


Exit, Pursued by a Bear

by schwutthing



Series: Exit [1]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil
Genre: Angst, Dubious Consent, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Dubious Ethics, Identity Porn, M/M, Madeleine Era, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Not A Fix-It, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Roleplay, Slow Burn, Toulon Era, also other porn but we will get to that eventually, by which I mean Valjean is permanently roleplaying, we'll all suffer the consequences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:22:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23446198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schwutthing/pseuds/schwutthing
Summary: If Javert had a heart, perhaps M. Madeleine would be a man after his own.
Relationships: Javert & Jean Valjean, Javert & Original Character(s), Javert/Jean Valjean
Series: Exit [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748014
Comments: 18
Kudos: 81





	1. To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores

**Author's Note:**

> Once posted a long time ago (2013?), now reworked. 2012 Film compliant. Rating E subsequently.

~1823~

Montreuil-sur-Mer was a small town. Javert already knew this when he had first received his posting to M-Sur-M, but as he rode through the city gates he realized all too soon that every back alley pimp and con’s movements would be catalogued and memorized within the week. _Ah, there is no kick!_ he thought. Not so different from Toulon, where convict and guard shared breathing space all like edgy cattle waiting for slaughter. The air was soaked with rain as he charged along the coast, sea spray hitting both him and his horse. Not so different from Toulon, except, perhaps, him on a horse. Toulon was, however, far behind him. It was more satisfying to place criminals there than to attempt to keep them, to not have to be punished along with them with the grind of sun and saltwater and the stink of bodies.

It would appear that water attempted to follow him wherever he went, though. His lips twitched upwards at the thought, a feature which passed unnoticed by the junior officers riding behind him, and would have been taken for a grimace if so. They constantly saw, but did not observe closely enough. Heard without truly listening. It was why he was _l’inspecteur_ _(“Commissaire_ now _,_ so act like it, Javert, _please_ ,” M. Chabouillet would say _)_ , and they were not. They used their hats of office like bludgeons, often scattering criminality without halting it. They rode past those who milled at the gates as if the riff raff that collected there were none of their concern, though they should be.

Javert, on the other hand, had seen what poverty would do to one’s respect of the law. Small town though it was, there might be more crime here to keep in check than his superiors had informed him of, after all. Yet, he had heard many good things of M. Madeleine, in his conduct and running of the town. All very commendable, all just. This thought comforted him.

He approached the factory at the directions of one of the guards, feeling the weight of M. Chabouillet’s signed message in the inner breast-pocket of his greatcoat. He made his arrival known, and the door of the factory opened. He scraped his feet slightly on a dry cobblestone, then stepped in. He looked around. The brick was sound, the temperature within warmer from the heat of the workers, the factory orderly despite the minimal supervision. He noted this in a glance, just as he noted the clammy palms of the foreman as he rubbed them together nervously, the whiff of bad perfume on his slack cheeks not masking his terrible breath. The foreman’s clothes, which while of the fashion of the town (Javert supposed) were worn in such a way as to accentuate all of his physical faults, of which there were many. 

Clearly, the foreman was an ass. His sideburns also left much to be desired. In all, not well put together both in spirit and in form. Javert wondered if it was charity that had allowed him to come under the Mayor’s employ.

Monsieur le Maire would soon be here, he was told, as he was left in the office of the factory’s upper level. It was about this time he made his rounds, said the foreman, who slid away thereafter. Javert waited, and resisted the urge to pace the floor. Officials… he did not like to deal with most of them. He was more comfortable in the streets, as incongruous as he was among the gutter filth. Usually he had little cause to consider these higher officials, to be fair, but this did not explain the current jitters his hands felt. The stories had been glowing. The mayor was known for excessive charity, a forgivable fault, but most of all he had managed to turn the economy of M-sur-M around. This spoke of an organized mind, efficient and exacting.

If Javert had a heart, perhaps M. Madeleine would be a man after his own.

A furore sounded below, but Javert did not spare it a glance. Petty women and their petty squabbles. That was not for him. No, it was when he heard the booming shout of authority that he too turned automatically, almost to attention. He saw an olive-green overcoat, a broad back, a man whose every line was most certainly not the foppish foreman’s. (He also had a nice top hat. Javert could appreciate that.) Order established order in an instant, and Javert watched. It was undoubtedly the Mayor. This, Javert knew without having been provided a description.

Then Javert realized that he too, was being watched. The Mayor looked away first, of course, for Javert did not presume he should have so much significance. The Mayor was busy, and would see him in his own good time. He was not unnerved, for honest men were not unnerved by others of their kind, but something of his father had twitched in him when the Mayor’s eyes beheld his, and he tasted saltwater and bile.

\---

~1796~

The boy perched at the very edge of the parapet and looked down. The ships were being drawn in.

His hair hung about his ears and brows, weighted with the sea spray that coursed up to meet him. He shook the hair out of his eyes, bringing a hand to rake it back against his skull, but it only flopped sideways in vague compromise. Below, men toiled in red shirts beaten brown by saltwater and sand. Their chants and songs flew with the wind to sting the boy’s nose, and he rubbed at it with the back of his hand to prevent a sneeze. One leg was hitched up, such that he could rest his chin on his knee. The other dangled over the parapet, foot trailing against the wall. Both feet were bare, and he held his shoes loosely in one hand behind him to keep them safe from falling. It had happened before, once, when he was much younger.

Shoes didn’t come by easily. He learnt his lesson quick.

He didn’t look down to try and guess which of the men could be his father. None of them were. Before, when he was younger, he had tried, as impossible as it was to distinguish faces behind grime covered beards and identical, crossly shaved heads. He had not even stopped after being told by his mother in one of her more lucid moments that her father had been sent on one of the ships. He had just wanted to _know_. Know how much of that face he himself had, that he caught looking back at him in the standing pools in the streets. If it would be his nose he inherited, if one day he would walk in the street, and one of the old convicts about to end his sentence would emerge from the workshops and look at him, and see themselves instead.

He did not know if the ice in his stomach at the thought of that recognition was dread or anticipation. He already knew he had his mother’s eyes, but his hair was softer than hers.

Not that anyone would have known of his father’s hair.

He was thirteen when word came that a certain ship had sunk, among others. That news had come by mouth of an English soldier, one of the many which swarmed Toulon that autumn along with their Spanish counterparts. Soldiers were soldiers, wherever they came from. Their uniform colours meshed into streams of red and blue and gold and black. 

The Bagne had continued to function, and filled all the more when winter came with the return of wholly French troops. By then, Javert had stopped trying to spot the muddied green caps out of the red as haggard men emerged from incoming ships in chains. Even then, he had not been sure which colour to seek. His mother had been continually unclear on this point. It was simply easier to search among the green. It was simpler.

He heard small cricks in the ground; gravel being kicked by careless boots. Three men in uniform appeared. Soldiers. With the navy. Javert swung his legs back over from the parapet, now pushing at the dirt with his toes, but he kept looking down the dock even as the steps drew nearer. They stopped about five paces from him. One of them spoke.

“So, boy, you will want to join the army, eh? The navy?” It was a reasonable question, asked in a, as far as that dolt Plantier could manage, a reasonable way. Most expected it of him, this was true. Two years ago he’d been asked by more than just one of the captains if he did not want to be a cabin boy. Adventure was promised. Gunfire. Cannons. The open sea, and glory, and food and board above all. But Javert would not work on a ship. It was too close to what his father had been. No. That was perhaps unfair. Javert amended the thought in his head. _Where_ he had been. He shook his fringe from his face again, and angled his head to consider the trio.

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“But why? You take our messages, and you took messages for the officers before. You see how it is, it is a good life.” This one, Besnard, Javert remembered. A simple sort of idiot. He was only three years older than Javert, had done the odd jobs around the docks and streets as he had up till about a year previous. One of the many gamin recruits from Toulon. Again, the reasonableness of the first question became apparent. Besnard, whose shoulders used to slope and whose gangly frame used to tip awkwardly against the cobbles now stood much taller, back straight and shoulders rounded full. Barely a year. It did not take much. Javert noted the appeal of the job. Javert rejected it.

“Ah, leave him be. What could a little street pup like that do?” Marchand asked. Both Plantier and he were new to the port. Asshole. Javert narrowed his eyes at him. He too, was not much older. Twenty, perhaps, or a few years older, but from what Javert has seen in the past week about the docks and streets, he swaggered like he was already porting about a belly of fifty, though the cut of his uniform still spoke to the contrary. Besnard did not notice the slight that could apply to him too. Instead, Besnard reiterated his case.

“They clothe you, man. They feed you.” Yes, Besnard, yes. Men lived not by bread alone, but by clothes and shelter, then died by the law of the sword. Or a cannon ball. Or a storm. Or disease, or crime, or—

Marchand’s voice cut through Javert’s thoughts. “It’s either that or pickpocketing, and what happens when you grow too big and clumsy for that?” asked Marchand.

Javert’s eyes cooled.

“I have never pickpocketed,” Javert said. His tone was even, and he spoke slow, giving equal weight to each word. He was glad his voice had stopped cracking. It made for better effect, now that his voice could growl without sounding like a mangled cat.

“True, true. You run yourself ragged all over Toulon delivering notes from sailors and soldiers to girls and back again.” Plantier really needed to stop being so reasonable. “Besnard says you are the best.” Besnard said a lot of things.

“It brings me coin, and food,” answered Javert. “It is enough.”

“Ah, leave the boy. He’s just a regular rebel, aren’t you, Javert? It’s in your blood.”

Javert looked at the men below him, and his lip curled. He looked back at Marchand.

“I am not.” Javert held the gaze a moment longer, itching to say “and it is not”. But then, he supposed, that would have been a lie, and he had told himself he would not. Lie, that is.

“Well then. Join us. Stop rebellion! Get glory!”

“You go about grabbing soil and territory over the sea, huddled on a wet ship. How’s that ‘glorious’? What has that to do with rebellion?”

“Rebellion is within the country, man, though their allies may come from abroad. There are many areas in the military, if you dislike the sea so much. Maybe you will go to Paris. You will like it.” Murmurs of agreement echoed around the group. The girls there they’d heard of. The treats. One would think the streets were paved with gold and not guttersnipes. Javert had no such illusions, and besides, no such interest in the women whose wares were themselves. Javert began picking at a thatch of moss growing on the stone under his fingers. 

“The army only stops the obvious ones,” he muttered, looking away from them.

“Oh?”

“Only the obvious rebellions,” said Javert, as if speaking to a child, watching to see if Marchand would bristle or sneer. Marchand did both. Smirking inside, Javert continued. “Only ones that involve arms and chanting and riots in the streets. Only ones which make like the war now.” He looked away, squinting at the mast which was nearing closer.

Javert heard Marchand mutter, “Ah, our fledgling Descartes. Truly, humbled by your insight, Monsieur Javert.” He chose to ignore the man.

Javert kept speaking. “And, besides. You say ‘the king’ here, another man says ‘the king’ there. What if _your_ king loses?

“Easier to serve the crown than the one man wearing it.

“Or whoever’s up there to be obeyed.

“I don’t just want to fight for one man. Men are,” he looked down again, past the hats of naval officers, and down at the prisoners below, “corruptible.” He arched an eyebrow at Marchand.

“Why, you—”

“Isn’t that one of the old officers down there? Placed for desertion?” It was more Javert’s look than words which suggested that the man below was not the only one who deserved to be in chains.

“You punk,” said Marchand, and spat. The spittle landed on the stones at Javert’s feet, just missing his skin.

Javert shrugged.

“Either you have a message for me to deliver to Marie-who-is-blonde-not-brunette, or maybe Rose-who-really-though-I-swear-she-smells-like-lavender, or you do not. Which is it?” Javert took satisfaction at the splotches of red which crept at Marchand’s ears.

“Oh, and what would you know of that?” Marchand countered, but his slight bluster did not prevent Javert’s lips from flinching at the words. His jaw snapped shut.

Besnard spotted, and nudged Marchand warningly, leaning towards his ear. He whispered something. Javert could not catch the words, but watched as Marchand’s face changed. His mouth shaped into a small “Ah” and his eyes widened, then edged their corners to match the smirk that grew across his face. Besnard said a lot of things.

The wind changed and brought the men’s voices to prick at Javert’s ear.

“Well, at her age she’s hardly a grisette, now, is she?” Javert heard Marchand murmur. “Which captain is she with just now?”

Even Javert did not know the answer to that, did not know if “just now” meant the present moment or the current week, but he stilled balled his fists.

“Maybe I should send my clothes to her for laundering, ask for a palm reading at the same time.”

“Ssh, Marchand, he can hear.” Yes, thank you, Besnard.

Marchand’s eyes slid to Javert. “Why? Because he has grand seer powers too?”

Javert stood up. He let his hair fall over his forehead this time, their tips twisting by the sides to conceal his clenched jaw. He faced Marchand. “A message, or none. Your choice,” he said shortly, “or go.” It was hardly intimidating.

“That’s no way to make business, my fine fellow,” drawled Marchand, “pretty sure your mother could teach you a thing or two about that.

“Pity. Your mouth evidently isn’t as sweet as hers.”

“Marchand,” said Besnard uncertainly. There had been a superstition about Javert tailing him through the gutters from his youth. It was vague, just a general sense of misdirected luck and foreboding. It had been useful at times, other times not. Besnard seemed to remember it now, the way he glanced between Javert and Marchand. Or maybe it was the way in which Javert’s knees swayed, deceptively, about to spring. He uncurled his fingers, laying the palm flat against his thigh. He recalled that a closed fist was considered a weapon. This was not the day for it. Nevertheless, the ball of his right foot ground into the dirt as it slid behind his left, two feet apart, and he pushed his shoulders back, leaning forward slightly.

“Bet I could teach you a thing or two,” began Marchand again, and Javert’s feet dug further into the grit, but he kept his arms loose.

“It’s fine,” said Plantier, cutting in short, eyes trained on Javert, having noticed the stance the boy had slipped into. Marchand flicked his hand, muttering an as you please. Plantier turned to Javert. “I have a message. Here.” He thrust a paper towards Javert, and a sou. Javert stepped forward, stiffly, his ankles having locked themselves in place, and reached for the sou.

“And,” Plantier said, reaching again into his pocket, “I hear it’s quite a far walk.” He planted two centimes into Javert’s still open palm. Javert nodded and did not look at Marchand as he passed the group now. He placed the coins in his pocket, and gripped the letter, starting into a jog.

The letter was neither for lavender smelling Rose nor blonde Marie, but for the brunette Marie-with-a-cute-mole-under-her-ear. As Javert travelled beyond the docks and towards the merchant’s quarters, M. Julien’s words from a week ago stuck fast in his head.

It had been over dinner when M. Julien, usually silent save to comment on the state of the floors or hand him his pottage, said, “M. Thierry will be arriving tomorrow evening. He leaves after, for Nice. He seeks someone to assist him, maybe to train. You remember our conversation a few months ago? I have recommended you. You are agreeable?” Javert had looked up from his food, mouth half full, and after attempting to swallow, mumbled over it an approximation of “Yes”. The old jailer had been satisfied with his response, and did not chide him for his table manners, or lack thereof, as his late wife would have.

They had given him many things. Food, often board. He earned it back in errands and work, of course, but even then—

Marie smiled at him and gave him another sou if he would run back and inform “Monsieur Plantier that she is grateful for his message”. He cringed inwardly. Could he run to the harbour then back to the jail in time? He glanced at the sky. It was overcast, and he could not tell if the darkening sky was due to an approaching dusk or storm. He hurried anyway, through the streets, careful not to slip on the stones coated with slime blown in from the sea. He found Plantier again, not too far from the inn he knew the soldiers to be boarding at, delivered his message, and rushed off, neither legs nor lungs giving in to the strain they now felt.

He reached the jailer’s quarters just as a patch of descending sun broke through the clouds. Right. He was on time, then. He smoothed down his shirt and trousers, and righted the collar of his waistcoat. The door was unlocked. He ran his hands down the front of his thighs again, and fiddling at his shirt hem, turned the knob.

A man he did not recognise was sitting at the table with M. Julien. It was most certainly M. Thierry. The man looked up from his drink. M. Julien waved Javert over. As he approached, M. Theirry spoke.

“You are Javert.”

“Yes, monsieur,” replied Javert. He clasped his hands behind his back, suddenly unsure of what to do with them.

“I am Thierry.”

“Monsieur.”

Thierry nodded.

“M. Julien tells me you have managed to improve yourself, despite your circumstances.”

“I learnt to read,” said Javert. Not grand works of literature. But he could read the papers, and the addresses people sometimes left on the messages he took.

“Numbers?”

“I can add and subtract.” That came from managing his own money, sometimes for his mother, other times despite her.

“Yes, Julien has told me of that too. He believes you would do well as my assistant. Do you?”

“M. Julien, that is, I—wouldn’t, I would,” started Javert, and stopped, and started again. To have to rate himself… the question bothered him. He frowned at the ground. “M. Julien is a good man.”

M. Thierry stroked at his moustache, a burly thing which hid his upper lip. “That wasn’t quite answering the question, boy. Speak plainly, now. I ask again, do you think you would do well as my assistant?”

“I will apply myself, sir. I will not seek to disappoint.” Javert said. At another look from M. Thierry he found his head angling lower, and amended, “I will not disappoint.”

“Is that a ‘Yes’?”

Javert shifted on his feet.

“Yes. It is. Sir.”

“And you think yourself prepared? It is not easy to manage a chain gang. Horses die, as do men, the heat is often unbearable, the smell more so.”

“I—I think so, sir.”

“Have you seen the bagne?” asked M. Thierry. Javert knew he spoke of the one Toulon was known for. Who hadn’t seen the bagne? This was Toulon after all. But that did not seem to be what M. Thierry was asking. Not from the way his moustache shuffled as the man pursed his lips. Javert fumbled for the right answer.

“I have seen them work, sir. In town, in workshops, and at the docks.”

“Have you seen inside the bagne? The cells. The sleeping quarters. The galleys.”

“I have seen these,” said Javert, gesturing towards the door which would lead past a strip of courtyard to the jail cells. Cells he had been more than acquainted with. Javert contained a flinch.

“And you think them the same? This is luxury, boy.” M. Thierry glanced at M. Julien, who had been silent throughout the exchange. The old jailer nodded.

“He’s a good lad,” said M. Julien.

“I don’t doubt it, Julien,” said M. Thierry, “but I have had boys whose stomachs ultimately turned when confronted with the task. I must be sure, and cannot waste time in seeking one every two weeks. It is not glamorous. Though,” and here he looked back at Javert, “You are perhaps less likely to be flinging your life away.”

Javert didn’t need glamour. Javert knew the inside of a jail cell. A bagne’s was just a larger version of that. Dirtier, perhaps. Danker and filled with more grime-hearted men. Men like his father. Men he had decided he would not be like. He drew himself up.

“I understand, sir.”

“But still you have not seen the inside of the bagne. It is not common that people are allowed there, after all, and you have had little reason. Come, we will head there now. Can you ride a horse?”

This, Javert could not. He hung his head.

“No.”

M. Thierry’s moustache fanned to the side, left and right like a polisher’s brush, and he hummed lightly. “Something you must learn, and quick, then.” He nodded at M. Julien. “I’ll take him along this moment. His dinner can wait.”

The walk was not so long from the jail to the main bagne cells. M. Thierry walked singularly, with purpose, and Javert kept in step with him, neither speaking. Dusk was still clinging to the sky. They reached the galleys, long wooden structures which reared a burnt red with the last of the sun’s rays. When they reached the cells’ main entrance, M. Thierry paused, then swept his hand in front of him. A nod exchanged with the guards and the doors opened. There was little light inside. There was an awful stench, much stronger here than when Javert had sat atop the dry docks all these years.

“After you, young sir.” The words seemed mocking, but the tone was flat and serious.

Javert stepped into the galleys, his eyes accustoming themselves quickly to the dimness. The prisoners, the men were eating dinner. They still seemed men, at least. He did not often see the prisoners up close, usually in passing, and those, the ones allowed to be in the workshops, were the ones about to be released.

“Just a day arrived, this lot, I’ve been told,” said M. Thierry, as they walked down the main passage. To the left and right of him men sat on widened benches, crouching or stooping as they picked at slop in wooden bowls. Javert found himself trying to breathe through his teeth, and he fought not to cover his nose with his sleeve. This was a test, he knew. He walked on. It was hard to distinguish faces in the dark, more so because all the heads had been newly shaven. Sweat and dirt gleamed and dulled both in the shadows from the top of these heads, most of them bowed, some with furtive eyes staring out, not yet glassy the way so many at the dry dock were.

Their chains. The sound did not rattle Javert. Nevertheless, they built an itch into his back that made him twitch his shoulders forward in an attempt to shake off. They did not move in time, but discordantly as this hand brought a boiled root to filthy teeth, as this foot slumped over a bench as a prisoner shifted on the wood, multiplied a hundred times, and punctuated by the falling of food scraps and waste in troughs near the poles to which the prisoners’ chains led. And another sound.

Crying.

A man was sobbing, near where Javert stepped now. He looked young, younger than many of those around him, and his shaven head did not diminish that fact, nor did the rings already about his eyes. Javert stepped closer. The man had glanced towards the square of a window closest to him, looked at his chains, clutched them, then let a fresh sob creep through. These were not loud sobs, but they seemed to strike Javert’s brow as he stepped forward.

“Of Faverolles,” he heard the man whisper. A manacled hand cupped a space in front of him, as if it were the back of a head. “My sister’s child. Her children. My sister.” His fellow convicts either looked passively on or turned on their sides, trying to block the noise. “I have a name,” choked the man to himself, and it was to himself, for he did not even see Javert who stood two paces from him now. Neither did Javert hear that name, for the man then clutched his hand to his chest and bowed deep into himself, and the name was only mouthed, not uttered.

Distantly, Javert wondered if his father had been the same, if he had known of _his_ child. But most of the other convicts were silent. His father had done time before, in the town jails, before being sent to the galleys. No, he would not have been as fragile as his man seemed to be. Not so human. Not so unlike a criminal, not like the ones he knew and sidestepped outside his mother’s quarters and in the shadier districts on his errands.

He almost jumped when the voice of M. Thierry sounded just beside his ear.

“This one. Ones like this are those you need to be the most careful of,” M. Thierry said.

Javert looked at him in askance.

“You think their tears indicate weakness, because they are not angry, because they are not yet hardened.” M. Thierry’s voice was low. “Perhaps. But then they grow desperate faster, when they cannot forget what their life was before. And desperate men do desperate things. Remember that.”

But now the man’s hands were limp against his sides. He did not look the picture of resistance at all. Javert looked again from him to M. Thierry.

“Scared beasts are fiercer, especially when wounded” said M. Thierry. He tapped the side of his head, then his breastbone. “There are many kinds of wounds.”

The man had fallen entirely silent now, his head bowed. M. Thierry walked on. Javert hurried after him but could not resist looking back on more time. The man had raised his head, and now stared blankly in their direction. Javert was sure the cast of light prevented the man from seeing his face, if the man could even focus on that. Javert turned quickly away anyway.

The stars on exiting the galleys were a relief. Javert blinked up at them, then at the moon which shone high overhead, so different from the sickly parchment colour which filtered from the overseers’ rooms in the galley. He breathed in the open air.

“Are you hungry?” asked M. Thierry. The question was sudden, and unexpected, and with it Javert realised that throughout he had been trying to contain a retch. He took in another breath, and the sensation passed. A second later his stomach rumbled, loud enough for M. Thierry to hear.

Thierry laughed. It was short, almost perfunctory.

“Acceptable. Let us return to Julien.”

Thierry had seen grown men reach for their handkerchiefs and dry heaved on entering the bagne establishments, or similar. The boy had done well. He would suit, and he seemed trainable, at least. He told Julien as such on re-entering the jailer’s house. He declined a second portion of food, watching as the boy wolfed down another helping. Hunger was good, thought Thierry, just not too much. And there were many kinds of hunger. He had spotted another, not easily remedied by just food, in the boy's face that evening.

He would do.

Javert ate silently as M. Thierry and M. Julien exchanged further news. When he finished, he stood to clear the bowls and cups. M. Thierry got up with him. When he had returned from the washing, M. Thierry looked at him once up and down, and his moustache gave a satisfied twitch. He nodded.

“You have family to inform?” M. Thierry asked.

“My mother.” Javert said shortly, then realising his tone, dipped his head. “Sir.”

M. Thierry waved the salutation away.

“There’ll be time enough for that. Inform your mother. Meet me at Julien’s at daybreak.”

Unsure how to respond, Javert did an imitation of a gendarme’s stamp to attention. A silly, cobbled clicking of the heels, his arms not quite straight by his sides. He pursed his mouth and lowered his head again. M. Thierry was chuckling.

“I doubt you’ll need that either,” M. Thierry said, but tilted his head as he considered the youth before him. He approached Javert again, who stiffened, ironically into a closer approximation of the posture he had just attempted. M. Thierry was not much taller than him, and if Javert’s feet were any indication, he had yet to reach his full height. Height wasn’t everything, apparently, Javert noted, for M. Thierry moved with authority.

“Though you could use a haircut,” said M. Thierry.

“Yes, sir.” This time the words came easier. Soon he would be free from Toulon.


	2. Know not the doctrine of ill-doing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of clothes and accidents.

~1796~

“Take these shirts,” M. Julien said, the night before Javert left with M. Thierry. “They were my son’s.” M. Julien had never spoken of his son. Of what Javert knew, the man joined the military once he was of age, was in the wars before the heavy conscription began, and had not wanted to inherit his father’s work either way. It had been an escape for him, though he had never returned, and Mme. Julien had grown numb when the letters ceased with the arrival of one final, officially sealed one. Javert wondered if that was why M. Julien had never suggested the navy to him.

But no, that would have been silly. Javert was not M. Julien’s son in any way.

“I am sure there will be uniforms…” Javert had begun, half rising from his cot, before M. Julien stalled him with words and a thrust of clothes into his arms.

“You cannot wear a uniform all the time. It will spoil.” Yes, that was sensible. “You may wish to save a few coins. There are a few sizes here, and you will grow into the larger. I have no use for them.” When Javert had looked dumbly on, M. Julien said further, “consider it payment.” But for what?

In the dim candlelight, Javert received the articles of clothing, and as he turned to pack them in his satchel, the candlelight flickered a touch more than usual. M. Julien spoke again.

“What have you done to your hair, Javert?”

Javert paused, hand suddenly at his nape as he fingered the shortened strands there. He ran his hand through the hair at the back of his head. It was uneven. He had not thought it would be so obvious.

“I, I cut it?” It had not been easy, shorter as it was than his usual. He had done it at his mother’s home before returning to the jailer’s quarters, over a wash basin and a small mirror. He had not stopped to consider if in her delirium of opium (“The good captain brought it,” she had murmured at his face, too close and so far away at once) his mother truly understood what he had told her. He did not trust her fingers to manage the scissors, though she had offered. That offer too, had been the opium talking. He did not think about her coughs and sighs as he cut away, either. He certainly did not think about the whisper of his name as he quit the premises. He gave his head a shake as if to clear the now-imagined sound.

“Are you attempting to look like a galley slave?” Javert’s brows slumped at M. Julien’s words.

“I—Sir, M. Thierry wished…”

“M. Thierry wished you to have a haircut, not take a blade and hack away till you looked like a flea-bitten dog.”

M. Julien’s speech had been measured, but the words fell like a hand cuffing Javert’s ear. Javert’s hand raised to grip at his now very bare neck, and tried to blow at his fringe over his eyes, though there was no more fringe with which to do so. Already a blunder.

“Come here.”

He followed M. Julien, trying to keep the sullenness out of his face. It was after all, not directed at M. Julien, but himself. They moved to the kitchen. The fire hung low in the grate, and the warmth was not stifling. A hand pressed down on his shoulder near the table. 

“Sit. Take off your shirt.” Said M. Julien. Javert obeyed, shucking off his shirt and laying it over a chair, then retrieving a stool to sit on.

Perched on a stool, Javert heard M. Julien rummaging through the drawers behind him. A clink of something, and footsteps approached where he sat.

“You cannot meet Thierry tomorrow this way. I will cut your hair for you.”

When the blade touched Javert’s ear he flinched away. M. Julien tutted.

“Hold still. I have cut a boy’s hair before,” said M. Julien, pushing his thumb to the top of Javert’s head to tilt it back in place. The man’s voice seemed gruffer than usual.

“It must be cropped. Smart, but not shorn.”

It struck Javert, then, that this was the most M. Julien had spoken to him at any one time. He kept his head still as metal snipped at the tufts that he had not been able to reach for himself. M. Julien fell silent again, and only the clipping of the scissors could be heard. Hair feathered down Javert shoulders, the strands sliding down his skin to the floor, some catching in the hollow of his blades.

“There,” said M. Julien when he was done, “Now you will not leave Toulon in shame and ridicule.” Nor return so, perhaps, were the underlying words. Javert stood and shook the rest of the hair off him, then donned his shirt again.

“Thank you, sir, I will get the broom.”

“No need. You have a long journey tomorrow, and you are unused to riding. Sleep.”

Javert resolved to make the shirts last.

\---

~1823~

Javert suddenly felt conscious that the hair around his ears did not lie quite flat against his head. To prevent that thought from distracting him, and to prevent his hand from reaching up to fuss, he repeated to himself what he would say to M. Madeleine. M. Madeleine was evidently a good man, an orderly man. Javert had so observed. Javert would not taint the law in the eyes of this good man with any appearance of slovenliness. He had been taught that first impressions were important. He tried to check the dirt on his shoes while keeping upright. He found himself pacing the floor.

The Mayor entered as Javert turned towards the door the sixth time, catching him mid-step. Already, a blunder. Javert stopped.

“Monsieur le Maire,” Javert greeted, his bow stiff and hasty, doffing his hat in reflex, proffering the missive. The Mayor’s eyes were wary. This comforted Javert. He would have doubted the calibre of a man too easily trusting. He too had seen and known men who made a mockery of their duties and had received their due reward. He resolved that M. Madeleine would not find him wanting. 

“Please know me as Javert,” he began. “Here at your command, monsieur, to do with as you will, both to your honour and mine.” He was no longer quite conscious of what he spoke, but assuredly, it would be about justice, about ensuring that those who flouted France’s laws would not escape her long reach and—

“Let all beware,” Javert finished, but now he was uncertain. The Mayor had turned away. Perhaps he had weightier things on his mind than the bureaucratic introductions of the new town inspector. Perhaps Javert had misjudged and overstepped— 

“Welcome, sir, come guard our laws,” he heard, and was relieved. No, Monsieur le Maire cared for the law as he did. “I’m sure we’re here in common cause, to the betterment of this town.” For order.

Javert realized even as he said, “You’ve done the city proud, you’re praised by those on high” that he might have sounded fawning. Javert was not prone to flattery, but this, surely, wasn’t flattery. “Your people thrive.” It was not a mere compliment. He did not dabble in those. What he stated was merely observed fact.

“The dignity of toil to stay alive.” A rosary and cross pressed into his hand. Their closeness allowed Javert to assess that the Mayor did not smell of cheap perfume like the foreman did, that his fingers were calloused, but warm. The Mayor was a grounded man. Javert did not dance, but if he did, he thought this was what it must feel like. Head crooked in deference, he allowed a smile to show. Something in the Mayor tugged at him, unmoored silly words from his lips.

“It appears we may have met, Monsieur?” A ridiculous question. Of course they had not met. Pleasantries, they called it. Silly. There was a time Javert did not engage in such. M. Chabouillet’s advice sounded in his mind again. Be not so abrupt. Niceties were no crime.

“No, Javert,” the Mayor said lightly. “Your face, I think, I would not forget.” But there was rebuke in the line of that brow and Javert felt again the marrow of his father knit in him, tasted bile again and bit his lip. He had misjudged. He had overstepped. The Mayor did not appreciate frivolous exchanges. Damn you, Chabouillet.

Chastised, he made to apologize, but a noise outside the factory cut him off. The Mayor quit the office. Javert trailed in his wake. It was all he could do. Ahead, the Mayor strode, past the factory door and down the alley. Javert saw him disappear behind the bulk of a turned cart, the source of the commotion. Fear and urine stank up from where the Mayor had stepped into. Javert hung back now, expecting to hear murmured words of comfort from the gentleman he had just introduced himself to. There seemed indeed little hope for the fellow pinned under it. A merciful, painless end would be best.

Then the Mayor lifted the cart, grunting, and in the same guttural breath Javert was tethered to his spot. He stared from cart to mayor to cart: the cart which pinned a man into the ground, the cause of the disruption in their conversation, whose weight now rested on the Mayor’s shoulders. The stench of Toulon seemed mixed with mud and horseshit in the road as M. Madeleine ground his shoulder against the cart’s pole and lifted as if he were not a man but a jack.

A Jack. 

Javert saw the shoulders of a broad man much like the Mayor, saw in the gritting of his teeth the bared ones of a starved lion yoked like an ox. A number bubbled in his throat. A name. It could not be. It was a trick of the mind, borne by his own failings in the office and a reminder of the non-universal guilt he had been borne in. Son of a gypsy and a convict. The stench of saltwater and piss that entered his nose was merely from the adjacent alley, those eyes that burned back at him, demanding he said what he must, were not the sullen ones which had flared at being called a number. This was not a young man. But—but that had not been a young man either, eight years ago, still unbowed by nineteen years of the law’s heavy weight. A man whose strength had moved at his command to drag a broken mast, a final penance before he was released on parole, a last reminder of the toil awaiting him should he stray again. The way Javert’s eyes had strayed. 

They were his mother’s eyes, he’d been told. Yes.

\---

~1803~

He did not try guess under which patch of grass his mother resided in at the communal grave site. She had passed the year before. She had just reached forty when she died.

Toulon seemed much the same, only smaller. But it was larger than Nime, larger than Nice, and more often than not the roof over his head would be at least wood and not canvas. The navy still milled, the soldiers still roamed the taverns, though they were different soldiers now. And in the town jail, M. Julien was gone, another man having taken his place. Javert’s visit to the old man’s grave was brief.

His new uniform as guard at Toulon was heavy, and Javert fingered the material as he neatened it about his belt. The material was a strange turquoise, as if it was copper half turned green already by the saltwater, then dipped in indigo to hide the corrosion. Javert supposed at the very least, it was nothing like the iron rust of the convicts’ attire. In this they were distinct. M. Thierry had sent him there as a deputy-adjutant, with promise of promotion within the next year or so. He only had to wait. Adjutant, chief-adjutant, it was agreeable to him. So long as it meant he would not eventually wear the red smocks himself, all was well.

The older guards considered Javert as he made his way through the galleys. Their faces had been replaced over the years. Or changed. He too, had changed. In the past seven years the sun and road had filled his frame. His steps were weighted, steady, but fleeter of foot than some of these cracked toothed, dour men. He had begun to grow a beard.

“Ah, you see that one?” Duval was taking him around the docks. Javert made no comment as they passed the parapet he had often run to in his youth. He had no desire to make this fact known, unless asked directly. Duval was pointing out one of the men in a particular chain as they hauled in a ship. The sea was calm today, and Javert had a clear view across the middle steps.

“Him?”

A massive back dripping seawater and sweat heaved in time with the rest of the prisoners. The legs were concealed by the tide, and the man’s matted beard stuck fast to his face. He was larger, certainly, than the rest, if not in height (though he seemed to have that too), then in the girth of his shoulders, and pulled with greater force. They had sent him near the top of the line, and still he did not flag. He was in double chains.

“Yes, our Jean Valjean. The Jack. Jean the Jack. He goes by many names. He has one, you see.”

“Why, what of him?”

“Watch out for him. He’s a feisty one.”

“What’s he doing time for? Armed robbery? Assault?” The man’s smock was older than that of those around him, more weathered. His skin, too, was a darker burnt which showed on his skull.

“Hah. No. A break-in about eight years ago. Only a loaf of bread, really. And he broke a pane.”

Javert considered this, and slowly said, “But surely that does not warrant-?”

“Ah, yes, that is why he is dangerous,” Duval said, eager to reveal what he knew. He chattered on.

“Tried to escape four years into his original sentence. Silly, really. He had only a year to go. They caught him in two days. Wasn’t allowed to go to the city workshops after that. But even then he tried again two years ago. Fought back, all that.

"Impossible strength. We’ve been told to tire him so he doesn’t attempt a fight when lock up comes, or anything really. A few of our guards felt the power of those fists.

"I think they hold a bit of a grudge.” Here Duval laughed. Javert nodded. It was not uncommon. This was a slight comfort. Toulon might be bigger, but the problems and hazards were the same. He noted Valjean’s outline and imagined his silhouette. Once committed to memory, such a shape would be easier to spot, even under the cover of dark. M. Thierry had taught him not to seek minute things such as details of faces, or clothes or hair, but the whole form. A man could easily retrieve new clothes but could not quit their bulk or gait so quickly.

Duval continued. “At least he is unable to slip his chains entirely. And now with double, but that will soon be past. We had a man like that once, I heard. Would slip his chains for fun. Escaped too, the same year Jean there tried. He’s been on the run since.

"But Jean was not as lucky. So, five years has become more. He’ll be wise not to escape again.

"Funny, really. They say he wasn’t like that when he first arrived.”

“Hm?” Javert was no longer listening, surveying the rest of the chain now for would be troublemakers.

“‘Of Faverolles,’ he kept repeating, through the first week. Those who travelled with him said he had done the same the night the irons were put on him. He had quietened on the journey, but that first night in Toulon had him weeping like a little girl again.”

“Of Faverolles?”

“Yes. Some of the old guards like to tease him. ‘My sister, my sister’s children’, that sort of thing. Within cudgel’s length, of course.

"The man is dangerous, after all.

"They say he was a gardener, or vineyard worker. No, no. A tree-pruner. That’s it. Well, that’s all past.” Here Duval shrugged, but Javert did not catch it. His eyes had swung back to the convict on hearing Duval’s imitation. The parody was a poor approximation, but it bit at his ear like an ant. A small thing, but enough to make one flinch, enough to make one scratch without relief.

The convict’s shoulders bowed and stretched with each pull. Javert remembered other shoulders, bowed differently, slighter. Javert gripped his belt.

His name was Jean Valjean. It could not be the same man. M. Thierry’s words came back to him. Yes, he had seen, on the road, those who turned suddenly vicious, and in the other two bagnes. But he would not have thought the man he saw that night would have turned into _this_. He was not even supposed to be here, his sentence was not more than five years, if Javert’s estimation was right.

Men changed, but not so much.

Already, the name “Jean” lined the edge of his tongue. Jean, the gardener from Faverolles. A simple name for a simple occupation. No. Jean Valjean.

“What is his number?”

“246O1. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?”

It was simpler than a name.

“Prisoner 246O1,” he repeated. He would remember this.

“Yes. But call him the Jack if you wish. Many do.”

It seemed too immediately familiar.

“It does not seem fair to single him out so often,” murmured Javert. “He should not get the privilege of recognition.”

“He certainly doesn’t pay for it,” said Duval. Javert angled him a glance.

“The barkers,” said Duval in explanation. “They charge a little tip to call prisoners by their name. The Jack has refused, and so everyone knows his number.”

“That is permitted?”

“Names are, as you say, privilege. The ones who can pay, pay.”

When Javert did not respond, Duval picked at his collar, and shrugging, said, “Anyway, let us stop speaking of prisoners. Your quarters are suitable?”

Javert tilted his chin down in affirmation. “I cannot complain.”

“Hah! That is good an answer as any. And have you another name, or are you just Javert?”

“Javert, only.”

“Huh.”

Javert’s lips thinned, but he kept his voice bland. “Is that a problem?”

“No, no, not at all, just not a name I can find a place to. I like to play this game, you see, guessing where the newcomers are from. For instance, Bosse came from Rennes. It’s why he hates the uniform for making him sweat, so. This port brings folk from everywhere. But I cannot pin your accent.”

“You can’t?” asked Javert, then nodded. “Good.” He no longer heard Duval.

And still he looked at the mass that was Jean Valjean. No, no, he corrected himself. 246O1. He looked and M. Thierry’s words came again. Perhaps men did not change. Javert just saw them clearer now. 246O1 looked up, and their eyes met. No longer were they unseeing, but their spark was a harsh one, as if springing from heated, angry iron.

Focus on the bulk, M. Thierry had said. The shadow, the overall form. Javert still had to perfect this lesson, for already he was seeking the human in the lines of a beast’s face.

\---

~1823~

“A man who broke his parole. He disappeared…” Javert uttered, distantly. A man heaved now in the mud. A man outlined by the wet dirt clinging to him. A number. A name. No. It could not be him. He had misjudged again. He had overstepped. “Forgive me sir, I would not dare.” His eyes darted away, down. It had been a bad first meeting, Javert decided, retreating from the scene in quick steps.

By the time he had reached his quarters, his hands were numb in their gloves. He tore them off with his teeth as he lit the stove fire, then threw the gloves towards the bed. Then he put his hands in his pockets in an attempt to warm them, for the room was still cold. He felt the metal points of a crucifix in his left, and his hand jerked back as if scalded. He had forgotten, in the rush. He took the object out now, watching the stove’s light catch in its surfaces. Each glint caused a prick of shame, till it washed over him. Here was a righteous man who he would sully with associations of a darkness to which he did not belong. Javert knew he would not rest tonight till he had made reparations, knew that he would have to—

He smelt burning.

He looked down. Singe marks. Ah _merde_ , and this greatcoat was newly issued.


	3. I speak as my understanding instructs me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javert does not understand much.

He vacillated between proceeding to the Mayor’s residence as he was or changing his clothes completely. Over the span of an hour he took off his greatcoat, examined it, folded it over a chair, took it up again, put it on, buttoned it, worried its collar, and hissed. No, he decided, this was not an official matter.

Frustrated, he tore off his greatcoat a final time, swapping his uniform jacket and breeches for a pair of trousers and a woollen waistcoat. Then he grabbed an older greatcoat, thicker but more worn, snuffed out the stove fire, and marched out of the flat, rosary in his pocket. By the time he had made it to the door, the night lamps had been lit, and a chill, damp wind was blowing. He buttoned up his coat further and made his way through the streets.

He had studied a map of the town before his arrival but found that navigating the narrow, cobbled streets at night was not quite the same. Here an alley dipped that had not been marked on the map, here a street was only packed with mud and dirt, and yet here a new shed had been installed, altering the route he thought he knew. He tried to recall the street they said the Mayor lived at. He could indeed remember the address, and after turning a corner to the main street, set forward with renewed purpose. Glancing at the stars to determine North after about a minute, he understood that his feet were taking him on a long road to it.

Javert suddenly regretted changing out of his uniform. It would have been easier to apologize as a servant of the law, rather than mere man. But that would have required a wait till the morning, as the structure of it all demanded, and this was again, not an official matter, for Javert had written no report, and his careless words were not documented elsewhere. As Javert mused on this, the long road became too short, for already the Mayor’s street approached, now a house came into view, and already he found himself peering through gates and over walls till he decided that this was indeed M. Madeleine’s residence. Too soon.

He understood that impressions during one’s apology were equally important as first ones. These moments did not come often to him, certainly not since his employ at Toulon’s Bagne. As he rolled the rehearsed apologies in his mouth, Javert stood out-with the gate, unable in that moment to move.

“Javert?” A looming shadow appeared to the left of him and Javert’s eyes unfroze from their fixed position on the Mayor’s door. The shadow grew larger into the person of the Mayor himself, stepping out of the night gloom towards the Inspector. “Javert,” said the Mayor, not a question this time. His mouth held grim resignation. 

Javert found himself bowing once again, this time unable to fully straighten. His forehead angled towards the ground. “Monsieur le Maire. I… I did not expect you to be out.” Javert kept his half-bow. 

“You have been waiting long? Why did you not enter? Surely my housekeep did not ask you to wait outside.” Had Javert looked up, he would have seen the Mayor’s eyes widen slightly. As it was, he only saw the Mayor’s right hand move towards him, and thought it better to concentrate on M. Madeleine’s coat pocket.

“I did not knock, sir.”

“You did not—you.” The Mayor spluttered, then sighed. “How long have you been standing here, Javert?” Javert did not know, and so did not answer. Instead, he remembered the reason for his coming.

“I have done you wrong, sir,” he said, careful not to watch the Mayor's face. “Private wrong.” M. Madeleine’s eyes shuttered, then narrowed. He shook his head.

“No such thing, Javert.”

“No monsieur, no, I did not give you your due. I did you dishonour, in thinking you were the cheap sort easily impressed by flattery. And yet it is not flattery,” Javert corrected. He took another breath. “You are not like, ah,” Javert did not stop his stream of words now, “this funny fellow I met a few years ago. An official, monsieur, but a ninny. He would expect the world to pander to him, with his—"

“Javert, you have done me no wrong today,” the Mayor cut in. He sighed again. His face looked as if it could not decide between being pained and being amused.

“I am a nuisance, even now,” Javert muttered to the ground. 

The Mayor was still, and Javert with eyes downcast did not see the flicker of consternation warring over M. Madeleine’s face for the briefest of moments. The Mayor straightened his shoulders, and seemed to shake some unseen water from his back. With a tilt of his chin the Mayor came to a decision. “Javert,” he said. “Come. Our introductions were cut short today, let us complete this in my house.” Javert looked sharply up.

“I would not presume to intrude on monsieur’s hearth.” He had merely meant to make his apologies at the door, to return the rosary. It sat in his pocket still.

“Javert, you are shivering.”

Javert found that this was so.

“Come, Javert,” the Mayor said, walking in front of him and through the gate. The voice was one which Javert could not help but obey. It seemed the Mayor knew this, for he did not glance behind him till both stood in the darkened hallway. “This way,” he said, and led them to a small study, where a fire was waiting, and simple broth and bread on a side table.

Javert stood awkwardly till the Mayor opened his palm towards one of the armchairs. Then he sat awkwardly, folds of his coat bunching up around him. He unbuttoned it, then noticed that the Mayor was once again studying him. The firelight waving over the Mayor’s face both softened and deepened the man’s features. Javert found the stare unbearable, and shifted. Something poked him in his side. It was the crucifix, digging through his waistcoat pocket. He drew it out.

“I came to return this,” Javert said, simply, leaning over in his chair, eyes fixed at a point on the Mayor’s waistcoat.

At this the Mayor laughed. Amusement danced across his cheeks, and something of relief.

“Forgive me, Javert. I did not mean to laugh,” M. Madeleine said. “Could this not have waited till tomorrow?”

“I would not have slept well, monsieur, knowing that I had been thief of your property, having already done you disservice with my conduct, and at our first meeting.” He too, knew that was a paltry excuse. No right official would have considered it an offence.

“Come now, Javert, that is hardly stolen property. Surely it is safe in the law’s keeping?” Javert looked up and saw merriment in the Mayor’s features, and understood he was being teased. It must have shown in Javert’s face, for the Mayor sobered, but still a smile played on his lips. “Ah, Javert, forgive me, forgive me.” The Mayor reached over to grasp the crucifix. As it was earlier in the day, his fingers brushed over Javert’s palm. Javert was left studying his now empty hand, fingers curling to press against where the Mayor’s had been before, licked now by firelight. 

“It is I who should ask for forgiveness, monsieur, for even comparing you with a convict. It is tantamount to slander.” Ah, the crux. Javert’s tone was bitter at the memory, then clamped his jaw shut as he waited for a response. He had already spoken too much. The Mayor’s brow was hidden in the shadows, as he had turned away from the fire slightly, but Javert felt the Mayor’s eyes resting on him again.

“It is nothing.” Then, “You look different, out of uniform.”

“Most men do, sir,” answered Javert, frowning. He could not grasp the Mayor’s meaning. The Mayor smiled kindly, then reached for the tray of food with a slight cough. Perhaps the cold had got to the Mayor too.

“Come, you must be hungry,” said M. Madeleine. He placed some bread in Javert’s hands, and held out the bowl to him. “This should serve us both, and there is more in the kitchen, I do not doubt.”

Javert nodded, thinking it wise to accept. He dipped the bread in and sat back in the chair, looking about. The Mayor did not live extravagantly, another aspect Javert observed, for the furnishings were simple, the colours muted but pleasant, a mixture of dark wood and light teal upholstery. He did not notice, as he swallowed around the bread, that the Mayor had sagged a bit further into his chair. He did notice, however, after some time, that the Mayor had not taken bread and gravy himself yet. He thought perhaps that the Mayor was pondering some matter, but when he looked up, saw eyes looking intently at him, all the more green for the furnishings about him.

“Monsieur?”

A closed look, and M. Madeleine waved his hand past his face, then cast his gaze to the fire. He smiled. “Just making sure our newcomer does not freeze to death on his first night here.” The Mayor reached for the bowl of broth, coating his bread in it till it soaked in the savoury liquid, and pressed it to his lips before truly biting down. The Mayor ate carefully, but surely, finishing the piece before Javert had his own. Javert swallowed at nothing now, not quite knowing why he did, echoing the working of the Mayor’s throat. He was still looking at M. Madeleine when the Mayor, whose eyes now slid to Javert, blinked rapidly a few times before a smile brokered its way to his mouth.

“Yes, so Javert,” began M. Madeleine, “I have perused the message from Paris proper. You have been assigned here, that is correct?”

“Yes, Monsieur Le Maire.” M. Madeleine nodded genially at Javert’s response.

“Indeed, it says here—” and M. Madeleine now twisted a hand into his coat pocket, and fished out the papers with Chabouillet’s seal. “It says here,” said M. Madeleine, reading the writing, one finger touching a particular line, “that you made your way as in Paris, did well enough as detective, and are now to be promoted from the _inspecteur_ into the _commissaire_ ranks.”

Javert shifted in his seat, “Yes, Monsieur le Maire, but the function remains.”

“Function?”

“Inspector, Monsieur le Maire. That is my role here.”

“With men under you,” said Madeleine. Javert could not discern if this was chastisement. He did not intend to appear to shirk his responsibilities.

“Of course, Monsieur le Maire. Forgive me.”

“You take issue with your appointment, Javert?” M. Madeleine’s pronunciation of Javert’s name was edged. Indeed, Javert had no such issue (or hesitance), but tasted sourness as he remembered some of the _commissaires de police_ , once dismissed, that he had appropriately measured and found, wanting, in Paris. Besides which: “To the man on the street, all policemen of a certain position who would talk to them are Inspectors,” Javert answered, shrugging his shoulders, and taking another bite of the bread. “It is easier to say.”

“Practiced humility is not humility at all, Javert,” said the Mayor. The tone was not harsh, but all the same, Javert’s head reeled back slightly, flushing. He made once more to apologize and again the Mayor cut him off.

“You seem ripe with apologies, Javert,” said M. Madeleine lightly, picking at a stray thread at his thigh. Javert fell silent once more, and M. Madeleine gave a strange half-cough half-laugh. “You have been this way both in and out of uniform today.” Ah yes, the uniform.

“I singed it.” Javert could not account for why he had decided to confess this.

“You what?”

“I ah—” Javert caught himself here, not wishing to utter yet another “forgive me”, and instead said, “My uniform, I burnt the greatcoat. By accident. It is why I changed out.” Perhaps this should have been treated as an official matter after all. Javert would not make the same error again should he be called to visit the mairie. At the Mayor’s arched brow, he explained further. “An accident, monsieur, as I said. I stood too close to the flame. I will have it repaired shortly.” The Mayor was still silent.

“Forgive me.” Javert’s lips twisted down even as he said it. He waited for the Mayor’s censure.

M. Madeleine’s burst of laughter might have startled Javert were he such a man easily spooked. But he was not, and as Javert had no heart, none raced in his chest, and the blood that did rise in his face came from his gut. He swallowed the flush back down, at least, he tried to. He was glad that the firelight masked it, and surely the Mayor would not notice.

“Forgive me, Javert,” said M. Madeleine this time, failing to conceal his apparent mirth.

“There is nothing to forgive, Monsieur le Maire,” answered Javert, nonplussed. His fingers grasped further at the piece of bread in his hand, still half eaten. The Mayor’s smile altered at Javert’s words, lips pulled tight in cordiality.

“Likewise, surely,” said the Mayor, voice quiet. The room hushed as the Mayor then reached for some more bread, eating again in small bites. M. Madeleine did not look at Javert again till both had finished their food, though somehow, in the interim, he had managed to pass Javert two more portions of bread. The silence, Javert thought, was bearable.

At the end of the meal, Javert was told in no uncertain terms that he could not return the rosary. A gesture, the Mayor said, of goodwill, as he slid the item across the table. As he walked home that night, Javert ran his fingertips over the thing’s metal points as he turned it in his pocket. He had forgot his gloves when he left his rooms that evening, allowing him to truly feel the object. It had chilled in the night, and so had the air around Javert, but this time he did not shiver.

He found out the next day the reason for the Mayor’s presence in the streets at night after enquiring with his men. The Mayor had his eccentricities, it seemed, though kindly at his core. Javert was not a man of charity, and so it did not concern him that the Mayor would spend his fortune nightly by pressing it into the hands of the poor who lined the docks. Javert only considered, perhaps, that others might be wont to take advantage of the Mayor, and yet, M. Madeleine’s brow carried a shrewdness that would not disappear no matter how light his smiles, and Javert was perhaps, assured by this.

That aside, Javert found himself marking his patrol route to align with M. Madeleine’s evening walks. Not directly, but just so, at this alley, they would pass each other by, and there, at this corner, Javert would see M. Madeleine’s back as he turned just ahead. Javert forgot entirely that he had ever smelt the sea in M. Madeleine’s wake, and as he himself passed through the air M. Madeleine had just quit, turning down the opposite lane, he often fancied that the scent of a clean hearth lingered. 

Among Javert’s duties was to report the goings-on in the town to the Mayor. There was a weekly brief, something instituted by his predecessor, but there were also reports made to the Mayor at his request. These happened with greater regularity, and Javert would ascend the stairs to the Mayor’s office every other day (save Sunday), on time. It was a pattern which Javert easily fell into.

The Mayor would greet him, hands often behind his back, and at other times, busy with quill and ink. At times, the Mayor’s eyes would gleam harsh when Javert recounted the punishments dolled for petty thievery and the accuseds’ paltry defences, and his words to Javert would be short. M. Madeleine always seemed to feel that the offender should be pitied, not punished. It was, after all, part of the Mayor’s charitable nature. Javert did not determine the laws, merely enforced them, and was not prone to debate, much less with a superior. He would merely flatten his brows, keeping his chin level, and continue delivering the report.

Increasingly, at the end of their meetings, the Mayor’s arms would prepare to lift some invisible weight half way, though his hands never travelled beyond two inches from his sides. Some days it was one hand half raised, some days two. Javert did not mull over why the Mayor did this as he smiled and nodded and thanked Javert for the report. All the same, he felt a knot pulse in his chest each time he observed this occurrence, one which travelled to whisper bleats into his palm. Sometimes, he thought he heard the Mayor sigh as Javert left, and that too would echo the whispering knot.

They did not touch, but Javert would imagine the press of an elbow or shoulder or wrist, and these sensations would he carry with him to the station, to his room, to his bed. Slowly, they would coalesce into the strength of an arm which wrapped around him, and he would see the outline of broad shoulders before darkness claimed him. Javert never pondered whose shoulders those would be, never saw the face they belonged to.

Certainly, Javert did not ponder on these things in the day. It was not expedient to do so.

Each evening, the flash of the rosary’s chains would greet him from where he had hung it on the chair in his quarters. He took to carrying it with him to avoid the sight.

“We are not made of the same stuff,” he told the Mayor tonight. They had met on the streets during the end of his patrol, and the Mayor was once more found in the slums, giving alms to the poor and directing them to better shelter. The Mayor must have changed his route, for Javert had not expected to see him on this street at this time. He had bowed to M. Madeleine in greeting, and the Mayor had struck up conversation with him. Javert glanced at the money pouch M. Madeleine held, oblivious it seemed, to any possible robber.

“You shine with a better metal.”

“You don’t know what you say,” said the Mayor, smiling again. There was a sadness in his eyes, presumably because he had just spoken kindly to a young waif of a child huddled in an alcove. “Your shift ends about now, does it not?”

“Monsieur le Maire is very observant,” replied Javert. The Mayor laughed softly, and his hand pressed at Javert’s elbow, gently steering. Javert’s left foot lifted, floated as it were a moment as Javert considered M. Madeleine’s fingers denting the cloth of his sleeve just there. The sun had set, and it was night, and because it was night, Javert’s eyes now traced the contours of M. Madeleine’s shoulders before he could stamp down the thought. He steadied his feet.

“Join me for supper tonight,” said M. Madeleine, his voice a leash which tugged at Javert’s fingertips. He could not refuse the Mayor.

Tonight, as they walked side by side, the stars seemed to dim, then grow larger, then dim to black again. The Mayor must have felt it too, for he sighed many times along that walk.

“Has it been a hard day, Monsieur Le Maire?” Javert ventured. The Mayor looked at him from the corner of his eye.

“Every day, Javert.”

Javert nodded, swallowing against the need for further words. They passed the rest of the walk in silence, tips of their shoulders brushing when they turned the streets’ corners.

The meal was set out in the study again, but the chairs had been drawn closer since the first time Javert entered, and tonight there was some pottage and wine. Midway through the meal he felt the weight of the Mayor’s gaze on his face, but did not glance up to meet it. He felt, rather than heard, the sips of the Mayor against his glass. Javert had himself declined the wine. The fireplace had dimmed like the stars outside, and the air grew thick in the crackle of embers. Javert reached for a log to throw in when the Mayor’s voice stopped him.

“Your uniform,” he said.

Javert almost smiled. “I will not burn it this time, I assure you.” 

The Mayor’s mouth tipped upwards, but his gaze remained heavy. He pointed the rim of his glass at Javert. “Your uniform troubles me.”

Javert looked up sharply. “It is but a uniform.”

“Yes, but I have not seen you without it since that night.”

“I could have returned home to change were it your wish—”

“It is no matter.” The sentiment was waved away as the Mayor set down his glass. The few dark drops that remained within pooled at its bottom. Javert caught sight of a glint between the Mayor’s fingers, and realized he was toying with a rosary. Javert thought about its brother, lying in his coat pocket out in the hallway. Silence, for a moment, then, “Yet still it troubles me.”

“The law and its effects trouble not honest men,” Javert said warily. This was not expected conversation.

“Yet I have sinned,” said M. Madeleine, and here the tone turned wistful.

“Every man is born in—” the adage bubbled from Javert’s lips before he could stop them.

“Yes, yes, I know.” Impatient now. The rosary beads were rolling against each other in the Mayor’s grip. Javert held the log, half leaning towards the fire, but halted as he watched the Mayor rise from his chair towards him.

“I think we are made of more of the same metal than you think,” the Mayor said, removing the log from Javert’s fingers and placing them in the fireplace himself. The flames caught, and roared back to life. Javert looked at the yellow and orange light, and not at the Mayor.

“You think too highly of me. If I shine it is because I am but polished coal,” said Javert, and found that his voice too, was hushed. “Fit only to be burned.” He thought of the drowned man they pulled from the shore that morning, and wondered whether flame or water was the easier death. He decided quickly that the noose was.

“Javert.” A hand was placed on his shoulder.

Javert looked up. He would disabuse the kindly, righteous Mayor of this vaunted opinion of his very being. 

“I was born in—” but he was cut off by the sight of the Mayor’s shoulders, so broad, so vast that they blocked out the light, then the wine coating the Mayor’s lips stung his own. 


	4. Be plainer with me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> M. Madeleine was a good man, and Javert was not.

Javert was a simple man. Often, if not always, there was a single reaction for every action. The kiss the Mayor bestowed him now was a simple kiss, this much Javert comprehended. Till date, his life’s course was pinned by a canvas of compasses in the sky’s night. But with this kiss, clouds flooded that sky, and Javert found in those clouds a dancing collection of ways in which to respond. Too many, and so he could not choose, unmoored and yet frozen, even as his face burned with the trace of fingers that were not his own.

When Javert realized his eyes were shut, he decided, quite simply, to keep them so. The kiss fluttered over his still shut lips, sticky now with wine.

When the Mayor moved his mouth back, it took Javert two seconds to discover that he had stopped breathing. He let out the air held within him thinly, and a small noise with it: a mewling sigh. The Mayor’s own breathing was short, his lips still barely away from Javert, and Javert felt puffs of warm air caress the corner of his mouth. Javert swallowed, inhaled, and as vapours filled his throat, swallowed again.

“Monsieur le Maire—” Javert’s voice faltered. Surprised at himself, Javert’s eyes opened only to see the Mayor’s chin and collar. Something rustled, and the string of rosary beads fell from M. Madeleine’s hands into Javert’s lap, causing his thigh to twitch at the faint weight. As he reached for it, the Mayor spoke.

“You arrest me,” muttered the Mayor to Javert’s jaw. Javert did not gasp. He could not, for the Mayor’s words coiled tendrils about his neck. “And so, your uniform reminds me how I fall.”

“It is not,” began Javert, but words clacked in his throat. He tried again. “It is not unlawful, by France.” It came out choked.

“No,” the Mayor said. “It is not.” A kiss on his chin, and Javert did gasp this time.

“But—”

“But what?”

“I would not have thought the bourgeoisie—your standing—mine—”

The Mayor laughed softly. “I manufacture beads on rosaries.” Lips on his brow, a benediction. “I profit from God in ways more than instruction.” Breath at his temple, tickling the flushed skin there. “My fellows, had they thought to do so first, would have done the same. Profit makes a man. I would not speak of bourgeois propriety.” No, that was false, Javert thought distractedly. The Mayor did not think in such cynical terms. He had seen his charity, had seen his service to society. He went to mass. He gave alms. The Mayor was a good man.

It was hard to think.

“You give—”

“Ah, but I take.” And another kiss claimed him, soft but exact, just there on his lips. The Mayor’s hands gripped both armrests, encasing him within. Javert’s hand fumbled again for the rosary while his mouth fumbled towards the Mayor. As his fingers clasped over the black beads, other fingers closed over his own. The Mayor’s mouth left Javert’s, and descended to the policeman’s hand now in his grasp.

“You see these beads,” said the Mayor, and kissed the knuckles between them, drawing yet another shaky breath from Javert’s throat. “They are cheaper now to make than they were before, they are more worth to me for it”. The Mayor murmured into Javert’s wrist. “This coal you spoke of, that you call yourself, it is more useful to a cold man than gold.”

“God—” Javert tried, face aflame, unsure if it was a plea, or what sort of plea it was, were it so.

“Would not deny me this,” finished the Mayor. He drew back to gaze at Javert, and Javert shivered despite the drops beginning to form on his brow. He had pressed the back of his head back into the chair, denting the upholstery even as his chin yearned towards the Mayor. The Mayor raised a hand to trace Javert’s jaw, drawing another gasp, though from who, Javert did not know.

“These have been my thoughts. This is my conclusion,” said M. Madeleine. Javert decided that the Mayor’s authority was founded, for he was the Mayor, and the Mayor was just, and it was on the whole, easier to agree.

Just so.

“Even the Son had the disciple whom he loved,” mused the Mayor, lips lightly following where fingers had just been, and Javert’s reply was a strangled sob. _The one called Jean_. Teeth now worried his bottom lip, strangely hesitant. He felt the Mayor’s mouth quirk into a smile against the corner of his lips, drawing back long enough to say, “But perhaps not quite like this. Even so.”

Again, the form of the Mayor concealed the fire from sight, and Javert clutched at darkness. The rosary clattered to the floor. The Mayor’s eyes raked across his, and Javert unbidden, buried his face in the crook of the Mayor’s neck. 

As the Mayor’s arms imprisoned his own, the grip of Toulon reared abruptly in Javert’s mind. He had, in that bagne, let his eyes wander over the form of a certain prisoner he thought broken, a prisoner whose back grew in time to brand dreams forgot by morning. But now was not morning, and those forgotten dreams returned. He recalled the strength of those arms now, even as he clung to the Mayor’s; because he clung to the Mayor’s. 

The Mayor was murmuring into his ear, hand caressing the back of his neck. The strength of those fingers resting at his nape wrenched a face which was _not_ the Mayor into the sight of Javert’s shut eyes.

A face which had never kissed another, for Javert had watched, then, and the prisoner had kept to himself always, had no furtive glances with others except to anticipate the blow of a baton. A face, Javert realized belatedly, which rested on the shadowy shoulders that haunted his nights, for it was the face with a name Javert found himself mouthing into the Mayor’s collar.

Valjean.

\---

~1815~

Javert had continued at Toulon, as he would, in the months following Jean Valjean’s departure.

The work carried on, as did the sea spray, and dirt, and smell. Javert only saw silhouettes now. Faces were not of use, though perhaps, on occasion, the eyes were. Eyes were useful, Javert decided, among the things which M. Thierry had told him to ignore.

M. Thierry had of course outlined the dangers of such an interest to him, most keenly, that his sympathies might be stirred despite himself. The convicts were under his charge and custody, but to care, to _care_ , M. Thierry had said once over a bottle of ale, would result in laxity and carelessness at best, at worst: corruption.

So during his time on the road, Javert spoke to the space between the convicts’ eyes and their lips when there was reason to address them. He thought, in the beginning, that there would be little to fear from their eyes anyway, as most kept them downcast. In this manner, Javert kept them anonymous save for their designations. He did not indulge them—or himself, their names.

But then one escaped, despite his precautions, and he spent one long mostly fruitless night scenting the coward in circles till he found him crouched between a boulder and a thorny bush three miles south of the camp. Under the cover of night, Javert would have missed the man entirely were it not for the pin pricks of reflection that caught his attention.

He did not remember that man’s name, but he remembered the crescents around his pupils, more than he did the grimy baring of that man’s teeth, even as he dragged him, silent, back to join the rest of the chain. He had been curious, as he shackled the prisoner, and looked to his eyes again, and found them staring deep at his, brow taut, but lip trembling. The prisoner looked away first, but not before Javert knew for sure that indeed, there was nothing to fear from them, only gain.

M. Thierry did not need this added advantage, but Javert was not so foolish to think that he was of M. Thierry’s calibre.

He took to looking first at the prisoners when they first joined the chain, took to watching them look away first, as they all did inevitably, and he had no more escapes the rest of his time under M. Thierry’s watch. He did the same at Toulon, though the prisoners did not look back most of the time, cowed already by the weight of their toil.

The only difficult one had been that Jean Valjean, now on parole.

The whites of Valjean’s eyes were not crescents, but fangs, threatening to tear into Javert, though Javert was immovable. A true beast, then, all through the remaining years of his sentence. Javert did as he had been advised, to ensure 246O1 was tired by the end of the day. It was to reduce the risk of him attempting escape yet again; to discourage all possible abettors and co-conspirators.

Not that the Jack was short of company for those. The escape attempts grew ludicrous after a fashion, the convicts inevitably caught and returned and whipped, but Javert never saw 246O1 among their number. Four times, Duval had told him, that the man attempted escape, always twice in the year that he chose to move. At the last, he had resisted. Javert almost hoped that the prisoner would do so again in his remaining time, if only to put to put his methods acquired with M. Thierry to practice, if only to be able to temper those bared crescents with his own strength.

However, apart from his eyes, 246O1 was perpetually compliant. Lift this stone, and he would lift. Drag that plank, and he would do so. Retrieve this. Fetch that. It became routine for Javert to devise tasks for this prisoner at the end of the day, when the other guards would whisper to him that Jean the Jack still looked unsubdued today, and Javert’s lip would curl at the nickname and bark out the prisoner’s number.

246O1, simmering always, would approach, and Javert would point at here or there with his baton, and watch as the bulk shuffled to carry that which would have broken the back of any other man. But not him, because after all, this creature was hardly a man by now.

Javert did not think, about how, when that back turned to him bereft of the creature’s eyes, his own would begin to traverse the entire form, seeking details beyond the outline. He would _not_.

M. Thierry would not have approved, but M. Thierry was a good man. Javert was not. Indeed, perhaps this was the reason he had returned to Toulon, the dock’s weak talons nonetheless keeping their hold on him. Still, Javert remained incorruptible, even as he knew his jail-born eyes dogged the feet and shoulders of a convict. Javert remained incorruptible, though dark thoughts licked and nibbled at his mind before slumber washed over.

He did not like the sea. The water stank, always. If Javert were a different man, he might have murmured discontent. But he could not fault the sea, however uncleansing it was.

In any case, all the sea spray did was add further blandness to Javert’s routine. A routine disrupted when one M. Chabouillet arrived in search of information about a man who had skipped his parole. Javert’s baton twitched in his hand when he received the officer at the Bagne’s office, and heard the name uttered by unfamiliar lips.

“Jean Valjean.” Javert repeated. He did not speak it as a question, and yet M. Chabouillet answered him.

“Indeed, fellow, the man went missing after his second stop in the parole route. Possible also that he re-offended, though there is no real proof of that,” said Chabouillet with pursed lips. The next few lines were muttered, “We have been tracing him for months. I had hoped to find more clues here.”

M. Chabouillet, Javert learned, was of the police. M. Chabouillet, Javert learned, was here for information.

Javert was well poised to provide that information, and so he did. First, in the bagne’s records of the convict, and later, as the week passed, observations that only Javert could have noted.

By the end of the week, M. Chabouillet seemed satisfied with his findings, though he still carried with him an air of scepticism towards the eventual recapture of Jean Valjean. As he told Javert this, his look turned shrewd.

“You would be useful in this endeavour,” said M. Chabouillet.

“Monsieur?”

“Undoubtedly, the man has fled to Paris. Identities drown there, which is excellent for a man such as this Jean Valjean. But you, I foresee, could tread the waters sufficiently.”

Javert did not quite catch M. Chabouillet’s meaning.

“How long have you been here, Javert?”

“Twelve years, sir.”

“An estimable sentence, I’m sure.”

Javert frowned. “It is not I who is serving time, sir.” M. Chabouillet laughed at the correction.

“Ah, surely not, indeed, but intend you to stay here your entire career?”

Javert had not thought of a career. There was none to be had growing up just beside the Bagne. M. Thierry had given him work, and he had continued what work he knew when posted to Toulon. Advancement within was a natural occurrence, should all go well, and that was all. M. Chabouillet was still speaking. Javert kept his attentiveness.

“Rather dull, isn’t it, to see convicts leave and hear they’ve disappeared into whatever hell-hole they decided to squirrel themselves into? And you cannot return them back to where they belong. The biggest farce, really, since where they belong is where you choose to be, while they are—” M. Chabouillet finished his sentence with a punctuated finger angled outside. This point, Javert comprehended.

“Sir, when I was with the transport, there were escapees.”

“Indeed, and I gather you brought them back.” This was not incorrect. “How did it feel, then, Javert?”

Something itched in Javert’s nose at the official’s question.

“Your skills are wasted here, Javert. I would bring you to Paris,” M. Chabouillet hummed, half to himself. “Yes, if Vidocq can have his agents, I see not why the commissariats of Paris cannot have equal talent.” Chabouillet’s eyes shot to Javert again. “Minus the criminality.”

“M. Chabouillet—” said Javert, starting at that, but Chabouillet cut him off.

“I perused not merely Jean Valjean’s records while I was here,” said Chabouillet. “All men must, at some point, choose their way.” This was again, not incorrect. But choices in this life were limited, Javert knew. Chabouillet continued. “Steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding, we must make sure our labour is not in vain, yes?” When Javert seemed not to understand the reference, Chabouillet laughed, but not unkindly.

“We will have time yet to get you accustomed to the language of Paris’ righteous,” said Chabouillet. “And now, would you not choose to seek men such as this Jean Valjean?”

The itch in Javert’s nose deepened, drawing with it a scent not unlike the sea, but unlike the sea, one he would breathe in deeper.

“It is not for everyone, of course. Society will give you no thanks.” Javert would not have got it anyway. He knew this. He suspected M. Chabouillet knew this too.

“So, my good fellow, what will it be? All that remains is to write to Paris.”

Javert chose the police. It was the only natural choice.

The sky was clear, and Orion’s belt burned brighter that night, but what seared Javert’s eyelids was a shadow he knew to be his eventual quarry.

Valjean.

\---

~1823~

“What did you say?” the Mayor asked lowly, though Javert had only made a wordless whine as he clenched his hands into the small of the Mayor’s back, body inching forward from his seat. His mouth opened again, half the name forming on his lips before his eyes snapped open. His throat had seized, but still the name ‘Valjean’ knocked in his chest with a shout. The room was swimming desperately into focus as his hands scrabbled against the Mayor’s waistcoat to push him away.

The Mayor’s face was too close, the firelight too uncertain, and Javert saw the face of Jean Valjean weaving in and out of the gloom. It was the wine, it was the wine. Though he had drunk none of it, assuredly, it had passed from the Mayor’s lips straight to Javert’s brain, for Javert’s eyes were wide with horror even as his hips bucked against the thigh that had slipped between his legs. He thought again of the drowned man pulled from shore, felt the coil of heat about his neck, and thought then it might be possible to drown in a noose of flames.

He stumbled out of the chair, knocking back the Mayor as he did so. Surprised eyes locked onto his desperate ones, probing. He could not bear it. M. Madeleine was a good man, and Javert was not.

“Javert?”

Javert took hasty steps towards the door, backing away from the Mayor’s hearth. Blood sang in his ears in the darkened hallway. His arms tangled in the sleeves of his greatcoat as he attempted to shrug it on. He shook the stubborn cloth, and heard beads on a small chain crumple on the floor. He did not stoop to pick it up, and as his legs worked clumsy half circles at the entrance, struggling still with the coat, he felt his foot hit the rosary, heard it slide further into the gloom, and he did not dare to let his eyes follow the sound, but he did not doubt that it had run to its brother now held in the Mayor’s hand.

The crucifix the Mayor held glinted and grew with Madeleine’s shadow as he advanced, painfully slowly, through the hallway. Javert fancied the thing expanded till it would topple and crush him. There was nothing to be done. Javert retreated.

“Javert.” It was a command. “Javert, stop.” But Javert did not stop.

For the first time, Javert disobeyed the Mayor.

When he reached home, he did not light a fire, but buried his face in his hands as he sat on the bed, and groaned when an ache flared in his groin. Ghostly fingers smothered his skin that night, and Javert twisted in the sheets, but could not rid himself of them, nor of the eyes of Jean Valjean.

For three days thereafter, Javert avoided all presence of the Mayor, conveying necessary reports by way of one of his officers. For three days, Javert changed his patrol route so as not to chance across the Mayor’s path. For three days, Javert remembered the dreams he was cursed to dream (of hands, of eyes, of a coiling about his throat) as the autumn sun pressed down on him disapprovingly. On the fourth night, Javert rounded a corner and walked straight into M. Madeleine’s chest. Strong hands caught him, burned him, held him.

Javert bowed, stepping back. The Mayor did not follow, and let his hands drop to his side. Javert looked at those hands, now opening in a question, though the Mayor did not yet speak. Javert’s jaw worked. Eventually, “Monsieur le Maire.” Both his voice and back were stiff. The Mayor’s eyes were soft, and gentle, and unbearable.

“You have been absent.” It was not a rebuke, but already Javert moved to hang his head. No. He straightened his spine and stepped away from the Mayor. He would not give himself the option to lean in.

“I have not been absent from my duties, Monsieur le Maire.” The Mayor could not fault him for this.

“And should I wish you to report in person?” queried M. Madeleine.

“I thought it more efficient.”

“But should I demand it?” Again, it was not censure, but this too, prodded at a hollow in Javert’s chest.

Javert started, stopped, chose not to speak. The Mayor had stepped closer towards him. He withdrew a sheaf of papers, marked in Javert’s scrawl, and tapped them against Javert’s shoulder. Javert chose not to flinch.

“I find these insufficient,” said the Mayor. “I would wish you to aid in some clarifications, post-haste” he continued, then his voice lowered. “Follow me.”

Javert obeyed the Mayor’s leading tug. There were no stars that night.

They proceeded to the mairie in silence, Javert slightly behind the Mayor, slightly out of step, as the hollow in Javert’s chest did not ebb. By the time they had reached the mairie door, Javert thought he would dissolve should he cross the threshold. Alas, he did not.

“These reports,” the Mayor said when they were in the hallway, drawing them out again. “They did not tell me the reason for your sudden departure.” His voice was light, and it looked as if the Mayor made to smile, though his neck strained itself in so doing. Javert did not wonder what it would be like to kiss it, but his tongue darted out to wet his lips before he could stop himself. The Mayor made a small noise at the back of his throat. Javert took it for annoyance.

“Forgive me, sir.”

He did not wonder why, at this point, the Mayor had shuddered as if in pain. M. Madeleine passed a hand across his own brow as he spoke. Javert wanted to leave. He could not. The Mayor’s instructions still tethered him.

“You say, this, always,” said M. Madeleine. His voice hung heavy between them. “You do not know what you say.” M. Madeleine sighed. “Those words are for me to say, tonight, perhaps.” Javert noticed a tremor pass through the Mayor’s arm, felt his own arm answering with a shudder as he clenched and unclenched his palm.

“Monsieur le Maire,” said Javert, controlling a twitch between his breast bones, “You called me here to give an account.”

The Mayor’s face did not clear. Instead, M. Madeleine looked at the papers in his hand as if they were a new thing. “That is so,” intoned M. Madeleine slowly, and Javert imagined that he smiled, and the hollow in Javert's chest bloomed greater.

“Your sudden departure,” said the Mayor, hushed this time, and paused. Something dark rippled in the Mayor’s eyes. “Why?”

When Javert did not answer, the Mayor pressed his words closer. “You do not move now.” Indeed, Javert stood taut to attention in the darkened hallway. “Why did you, then?” Their knees almost touched, and black heat murmured in the space between them. The Mayor moved closer yet.

Javert spoke. “I thought of another as you kissed me.” The words sounded drowned.

“Another?”

“From my youth.” He paused, blushed, then added, “From afar.” It was not entirely a lie, but Javert’s blush deepened as he saw the Mayor nod. “Forgive me. I could not. I saw them in you.” Then Javert’s eyes slid shut, for a hand had cupped his cheek.

“And who do you see now?”

Javert felt the warmth of the Mayor thrumming past his clothes, pooling into the palm which cradled his jaw. The warmth compelled him to press his mouth to the inside of the Mayor’s wrist. Distantly, he heard a sharp intake of breath. A frown troubled his brow.

“I still see them,” Javert said. “They brand the insides of my eyelids,” he whispered against the wrist, and heard another gasp, low, like a tide retreating. “Like the brands of Toulo— ”

“I would sear that image away,” said the Mayor, voice like faraway thunder, and Javert trembled as a kiss was pressed first to one closed lid, then another, tip of a wet tongue dipping out and retracting with the second. Still, Javert would not open his eyes. “What was their name?” came the questioning voice again, this time accompanied by the length of a man’s body pressed against his. Nearer. Nearer. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut. “Their name?” Demanding breath curled against his earlobe.

“Jean,” Javert choked.

Through the thick of air, he thought he heard a groan, then hands were gripping his collar, forcing him against the wall, and a mouth latched onto his, breathing heat and wet and life. When the Mayor pulled back it was only to say, “Such a common name," in a low laugh, mixed with a sort of want Javert could not place, “So unlike Javert,” before sliding his tongue into Javert’s pliant, open mouth.

Javert found himself losing purchase against both wall and floor, and sought it instead in the Mayor’s arms. His left knee fell to the side and the Mayor’s leg sidled into the space it had been in. A hand grabbed his hip, another worked at the buttons of his greatcoat, then slipped past it to cup a buttock. Javert threw his chin upwards at the touch, and was rewarded with kisses to his jaw, heating and chilling him both. 

“My housekeeper is not in tonight.” The voice was a growl. Javert could barely nod, could only gulp in reply. “I could take you here like this. I could brand you as my own,” punctuated with grinding of hard heat to ache. Javert was wordless, senseless, even as he felt a hand drag him through a door, felt himself pushed towards a yielding mattress. He found himself half-sitting, half-lying on a bed, propped on his elbows with knees dangling over the edge. The door shut, and hands were on him again in the dark, tugging at his sleeves, undoing his buckle and jacket and breeches and—

“Oh.” Javert’s hips jerked forwards into the waiting press of the Mayor’s palm. Only thin linen drawers separated them. “Oh.” The hand was removed, and Javert hunched over, straining at the loss. The rest of his jacket was pushed off him, and his shirt, then his boots, and he heard the Mayor shuffle out of his own clothing, catching a glimpse of a white shirt before hands roamed over him again. He caught the glimmer of something else as well, of metal shining in the glow of moonlight that streamed past the shutters, then something cool, a soft loop, was passed over his head to rest about his neck.

“M—Monsieur?” Javert felt the chill of metal against his collar bone, the coolness of round beads.

“You came to return it, once,” said the Mayor, kissing both collar bone and crucifix, light stubble scratching his neck. “You left it, fallen, the other night.” Kissing fire and brimstone. Javert gnashed his teeth, but the Mayor licked at them too, causing them to part in soundless sob. “I would sanctify this night, with you.” Javert threw an arm over his face, biting his lip to shut in the sounds which leapt at his teeth.

A hand gripped his short hair, laxed, tightened again, as if disappointed in its length.

“Mercy,” uttered Javert, utterly lost.

“Does it burn?” asked the Mayor, voice both tremulous and dreadful at once. “You shiver. It does not burn. These black beads, this crucifix, they bless us.” The Mayor licked around each bead, tracing the whole line of his neck before descending towards Javert’s abdomen. “I would accept this gift from God.”

“Mercy.”

“I would my winter was lit with worthy coals.” Hands pushed his shoulders into the bed, his remaining clothes peeled away, cool air stroking his pulsing cock for a second before a real, warm hand did. Javert cried out, a babble of _mercy_ and _please_ and _oh god_ , the repetitions of this strange prayer going uncounted as an arm nailed one hand outstretched to his side, then a hip and another man’s cock ground into his, and his other arm was shifted to mirror the first. Pinned like a thief on a cross, he bucked and thrust and keened against the mercy that was Monsieur le Maire. _Mercy. Mercy. Please. Mercy._

“Peace,” whispered M. Madeleine, his shirt collar dragging at Javert’s cheek, and Javert was undone.


	5. A sad tale's best for winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things seen as through a glass, darkly.

Lying in his spend, chest still heaving, Javert felt M. Madeleine leave the bed. M. Madeleine lit the fire in the room now, and as Javert watched the shadows flicker in the grate. He did not think of a certain parole breaker, mind filled as it was with the curve of the Mayor’s spine, eyes following the folds of his shirt till they ended mid-thigh. As M. Madeleine squatted and knelt near the flames, the material barely concealed his manhood. Nonetheless, M. Madeleine moved steady and unashamed, retrieving scattered articles of clothing and folding them neatly over chairs.

M. Madeleine then left the room completely, and when he returned, Javert noted that he had fetched a cloth and a wash basin. M. Madeleine neared the fire again, wetting and wringing the cloth. He continued this motion twice more. If he felt Javert’s stare, M. Madeleine did not show it.

Javert watched on as the shadows leapt from the grate to the Mayor’s hands. Even the motion of dipping the cloth in water belied the large hands’ strength and gentleness both, a strange two things to be in tandem. This was again reflected in the lift of the M. Madeleine’s lips as he turned and smiled at Javert. Javert’s lashes stuttered at this, continued doing so as M. Madeleine approached.

A damp cloth was laid to Javert’s inner thigh, causing Javert to jerk slightly away at the wet coolness, breath hitching as his still dazed eyes tried to focus on M. Madeleine’s shadowed face. He could not, and looked down instead to see a hand drag the cloth along thigh, dip out of sight to wipe his privates, then emerge along the other thigh. The cloth was rough, and M. Madeleine’s press was firm, and Javert found his abdomen rising and falling in ever slowing rhythm, till it seemed they would still altogether. Then that abdomen was covered with the damp cloth, now warmed by his own body and the Mayor’s hand, and that too was cleaned. The cloth was removed, and Javert’s breath returned.

M. Madeleine smiled again. Such a smile splintered through Javert’s throat, and unspoken words caught there. Javert made to rise, but a hand spread over the centre of his chest, pushing softly but surely down. He settled for lying on his side, one palm not-quite pressing on the bedsheet. M. Madeleine paused now. Javert thought he heard a _tsk_ , a click in M. Madeleine’s mouth that was not quite a swallow, then a singular, soft laugh escaped it. The hand left Javert’s chest, brushing past his shoulder as it did so.

“Monsieur?” asked Javert.

A finger reached out to trace the rosary about Javert’s neck. “My nights are ever cold, Javert,” said M. Madeleine. A sigh left M. Madeleine, then he was climbing into the bed, past Javert, close to the wall. “I would not waste this night,” uttered the Mayor, shuffling himself around the line of Javert’s back. Javert felt how M. Madeleine’s body thrummed with warmth through the shirt that separated their skin. He shivered. Tutting, M. Madeleine reached over to the crumpled covers that had made their way to the far side of the bed, and drew it over them both.

Then, a kiss, so chaste it was uncertain, was pressed into the space between Javert’s skull and nape. “Stay,” said the Mayor.

So Javert did.

At some point in the night, Javert awoke. He had turned in his sleep and now lay facing M. Madeleine. Between the slivers of light from the window outside, and the glowing embers in the fire place, Javert observed the lines on the Mayor’s face. They were slightly drawn, even in sleep, though now and again the brows would relax into what seemed like supplication. It was uncanny, and Javert’s hand rose unbidden to smooth over the brow.

Madeleine’s eyes flashed open at the first touch.

Javert withdrew his hand just as quickly, rising up on his elbows, upsetting the covers. Both men flinched. M. Madeleine continued looking straight at Javert, eyes widened and nostrils flaring in quick breaths. Javert wondered if the booming he heard in his ears was M. Madeleine’s pulse or his.

“Forgive me, monsieur. I—” Javert gulped and fell silent, thrown by the ferocity in M. Madeleine’s silence, so different from but a few hours earlier.

“Javert,” said M. Madeleine. His voice was harsh and cracked, his body rigid. He wet his lips, once, twice, brows furrowed, eyes flitting across Javert’s face. Otherwise unmoving, the hard line of his shoulders betrayed the clenched fists that remained under the covers. M. Madeleine’s stillness was that of a creature about to bolt. His eye continued to search about Javert, then beyond him into the room. Javert’s mouth had run dry, and hung half open.

Then M. Madeleine caught sight of the cross about Javert’s neck, and his face cleared. M. Madeleine let out a deep breath, passing a hand across his face to wipe off the brewing storm there. When he had removed his hand, his face had settled into weariness. But he found Javert’s face again, as if he had not seen it the first time, and smiled, reaching to trail fingertips around the crucifix.

“So suddenly, it changes,” murmured M. Madeleine, voice still rough, half to himself. His eyes found Javert’s. “It is nothing,” said M. Madeleine on seeing Javert’s still stuck jaw. He passed his hand over his face again. “I have startled you.”

“You have not,” Javert said, but the words ran tight in his throat. He felt fingers catch again at the rosary about his neck.

“It is not a true rosary,” he heard M. Madeleine say, and looked down to watch M. Madeleine’s hand wrap around the chain, and felt himself be tugged gently downwards. Javert let his head fall to the pillow, still gazing at M. Madeleine. M. Madeleine saw the askance in Javert’s eyes.

“It is a prototype,” M. Madeleine explained. “The cross design was found lacking. The bead order is wrong. And of the wrong size. Here, see.” He lifted one of the beads, the same size in the sequence where it should have been larger, then his gaze became distant, and he said, “Perhaps it is better this way”. Javert’s frown deepened, troubled at this, his mouth turning down as he shifted away to look at the ceiling. M. Madeleine seemed to sense Javert’s discomfort, and leaned over, clasping Javert’s jaw in one of his hands.

“Perhaps it is better this way,” M. Madeleine repeated, looking Javert full in the face. “It is no less a token: of _my_ faith, to you.

“I would Javert would wear it still.”

A thumb ghosted over the corner Javert’s lower lip and he caught it gently, pressing his lips around it before releasing it again with an exhaled breath. M. Madeleine sighed with it. _So suddenly_ , Javert’s mind echoed, _it changes_.

“Javert would, monsieur,” answered Javert. The look in M. Madeleine’s face was too full, but before Javert could avert his gaze, the Mayor glanced at the shutters, observing faint moonlight beyond.

“And so, the first snows fall early,” M. Madeleine said.

“It will not stick,” said Javert, voice dubious at yet another swerve in the conversation. At that, the Mayor laughed, drawing Javert into his arms, and Javert warmed, and slept, and did not dream.

When Javert next awoke, the Mayor had already dressed in waistcoat and trousers, sleeves and collar tugged full and straight. The fire was burning, and Javert sat up, then made an aborted movement to cover his nakedness as the sheets fell away. The Mayor did not seem to notice, continuing to lay out Javert’s clothes on the chair, unperturbed. This allowed Javert to slowly ease himself further upright. Looking about him, Javert realized that a side table near the bed held a plate of buttered toast and a cup of milk, which when he drank, was warm.

“You treat me like a child,” Javert muttered, half accusatory.

“You would level such a charge against me?” The Mayor’s voice seemed to twinkle.

Javert’s eyes met the Mayor. “I would not dare.” The Mayor smiled, and left Javert to change in peace.

The snow, as Javert had predicted, did not stick that day, but by the fifth day the puddles gave way to slush and windowsills were lined with white. Both Javert’s horse and his boots found the slush disagreeable, and Javert found himself increasingly curt in his dealings with both citizens and criminals alike, and his cane moved quickly.

Embroiled in his work, criminality spurred by the lash of winter’s chill, Javert did not pay the Mayor another visit at his residence in the days following. The trips to the Mayor’s office continued. Each time he brought a report, the Mayor would praise his upholding of justice, and brush against his wrist in some echo of that night, and the crucifix that lay under wool and cotton against Javert’s breastbone would thrum.

“I _am_ sorry, Javert,” said the Mayor after one such report. He seemed put out.

“Monsieur?” Javert had half-risen already from his chair.

“That you continue to double up in your duties.”

“It is no matter—”

“I had hoped,” said the Mayor with steepled fingers, “That in asking for a _commissaire_ , the rest would follow.” He sighed, and turned slightly in his chair to consider a letter by his hand. “And yet it does appear that you remain the town’s only Inspector too.” He put the letter down with lips pursed along a thin line, and angled his head to look up at Javert.

“I am accustomed to it.” Javert’s feet moved to click his heels to attention. “Furthermore, the confirmation is yet to be had. Probation, merely.”

“That matters not to me, Javert. It is not my intention to work you like a horse.” The Mayor’s lips twitched. Javert sensed merriment in their movements.

“We plough where we are led,” replied Javert, and allowed himself a small smile. The Mayor seemed to notice, and returned it.

“Of course, Javert.”

Javert nodded in acknowledgement.

The Mayor’s smile clenched strangely, then deepened. “Your worth to me doubles,” said the Mayor. The words felt like a promise, as did the Mayor’s hand brushing his elbow as he ushered Javert out of the room.

The nights were darkening quicker, along with it the necessity of increasing patrol in certain unsavoury areas, most particularly just outside the area town walls proper. It was not yet six in the evening when Javert entered the prostitutes’ cove, the sky already black. His lip curled as he picked his way through mud and shit. The place stank of stale opiate and fresh shame, as it always did, wind and weather be damned.

He considered, as he had occasion to, that it was good that he had been born in a jail instead of in unfettered filth such as this. The Mayor’s improvements had yet to rid the town entirely of its necessary vices, but by and large they did not creep into the main part of town. Ever alert, he moved through the streets, scattering street urchins and pimps both, continuing in his circuit towards the hulking wrecks of ships long past their original, decent use.

As he neared, he heard a commotion, and moved swiftly towards the sound. A prostitute pleading, a citizen attempting to extricate her from his presence, and an on-looking crowd. Javert stepped through the sickly shadows into the view of the congregated scum.

Pimps and prostitutes alike fell back, leaving behind two people. The man raised his face, and Javert saw the red marks of blood where nails had scratched. The man was Bamatabois, a dandy and a ninny, but a citizen nonetheless, who paid his taxes and whose father ran a profitable business. The story was told. He had been walking, he had got lost, the prostitute had attacked him. Yes, Javert observed the scratch marks well, noted that it was a woman’s claws which had inflicted the damage. A common result of disputes in the area.

“Make a full report at the station, monsieur. She will answer to the court.”

He strode towards the woman. She had begun begging. Javert did not pay much attention to her words. Her tone was the same as those in Paris which had been wailed to him over and over and over. A mother who was sickly, and this one, a daughter who was ill, who was dying. It was all the same. He had heard it the past twenty years, he had heard it for longer, muttered in the cells at Toulon, muttered in his nursery of strife and sin. She would do better to save her breath. She had assaulted another and had no proper papers to deal with the town’s citizens. It was enough.

He sneered softly at a face that was not his mother’s and yet could have been. He hated this part of town. His officers took hold of the woman and he stepped back, shielded from pity by his uniform though her hands still reached out to implore him. Their party began to move.

A face stopped them. It was the Mayor. Immediately, Javert removed his hat in salute.

“A moment of your time, Javert.”

“Monsieur le Maire,” Javert said with a slight smile. He bowed again in deference. This was not worth the Mayor’s time, surely, this trivial, clear cut matter. It would not even make the main report for the morrow. Again, the beads and cross against his skin warmed, and Javert was glad for the layers which hid their form. But his smile quickly sunk into a frown. The Mayor was demanding her release. The Mayor called this castaway a friendless child, and from the shuffling he heard behind him, his officers had released the woman at the Mayor’s command.

“Monsieur le Maire,” Javert repeated, testily. This could not be. The Mayor did not understand, the Mayor did not see that this was not simply prostitution. After all, such vices abounded, and within the limits of the law they were unfortunately permitted. He did not comprehend, that no, this had been assault.

The Mayor moved past Javert then, speaking kindly (for the Mayor was kind), but the woman edged back and away, casting ungrateful spite at the Mayor. Javert could not move, obedient to the authority which the Mayor radiated even now, torn between his duty both to the Mayor and to the law as both warred against each other where before they had been perfect allies. Perhaps that was dishonest: Javert could not move, for he was as hypnotized as the rest of the crowd at the scene unfolding before him.

This was broken when the prostitute spat at the Mayor’s face. But still the Mayor did nothing more than wince.

Javert was aghast, but it would not do to impinge on the Mayor’s standing. It would not do to emasculate him by pretending to come to his aid, even at such a moment. He stopped his officers with a half raised hand before the hasty men fell in danger of disrespecting M. Madeleine. Still, Javert watched, as the Mayor squatted towards the now crouched woman, as the Mayor’s gentle hands lifted hers up, and as the Mayor’s strong arms folded her in his embrace. He could not possibly—

The Mayor spoke again, louder, to the crowd, to Javert. “I will take her to the hospital.” It was not a request.

It flouted the very protocol of arrest, and arrest had already been enacted. And now, she had spat on the Mayor. Yet now, the Mayor had obstructed justice. There were proper ways in which to appeal, in which to overturn the arrest, but the Mayor had ignored that. Javert did not ponder why this felt like a personal slap in the face, but still he bristled with the sting of it, as he looked at the Mayor whose eyes were solely on the wretched, cringing woman. The Mayor disappeared out of sight into the upper streets, and he heard a carriage being hailed, then driving away.

He dismissed the crowd. He dismissed his men. He found himself walking towards the hospital where the Mayor was sure to be. The rosary now chafed at his neck as his boots strode through the cobbled streets in too-loud clops. He jut out his chin and rolled his shoulders backwards to rid himself of the constricting loop about his neck, but still it tightened, cutting off air till he had to grit his teeth in an attempt to breathe through them. His buttons reminded him of his office when he reached up to his collar, and thus, he continued with renewed fervour.

When Javert reached the hospital, the Mayor was just quitting the building, head down and shoulders slumped, such that he did not see Javert till he was only three paces away. Javert held his back stiffly, and did not bow. The Mayor looked up, and again Javert saw something of the resignation that had plagued his eyes the first night of their meeting. Javert steeled his jaw, even as he bit out, “Monsieur le Maire.”

“Javert,” greeted the Mayor, tone sombre.

“Monsieur le Maire, the woman is under my custody.”

At this the Mayor’s eyes hardened. His head angled upwards, gazing hard at Javert. “She is under your custody no longer, Javert.”

“Then let me correct myself, monsieur. She is under the law’s custody, and I am steward of that law. You must allow me to—”

“I will do no such thing.”

“You do more harm than good, with this superseding of lawful authority among a nest of poisoned vipers. How am I to establish order if the Mayor twists the law as he pleases?”

“Perhaps you could apply the law of mercy, Javert.”

“I do not dictate the laws, monsieur, and your mercy is not one of them,” replied Javert sullenly. The Mayor looked pained then, one hand rising to hold his chest, the other reaching towards Javert, beseeching. Javert would not be beseeched, and ploughed on, “You would let her trample over you, your office? You would protect a whore at the expense of the law?”

At this, the Mayor’s countenance darkened immediately, and he took a deliberate step closer to Javert. Javert resisted the urge to step back. He would not be cowed. “Do not say that,” said the Mayor, warning in every line of his posture.

“I had thought you upright.”

“I had thought you kinder than this. I had thought our conversations—”

Javert let out a hoarse, incredulous bark. “So, you would pamper a whore—”

“Do not call her that.”

“Yet you would treat the law as one? To service you when you would it, to forget when you are sated? To discard when she accosts you?” Javert sneered now, and in the silence of street hissed, “You would whore me?”

The Mayor reeled as if struck. “This is not conversation for the street,” he said, voice low, calming. It was the same voice he had used with the prostitute. Javert found his teeth bared, and bit back a snarl. Instead, he let the curl of his upper lip lean near the Mayor’s ear only to say, voice suddenly calm and too soft for any passer-by to hear, “Perhaps I am doubly useful to you, being so cheap.”

He moved back, and tried not to take pleasure in the Mayor’s stung expression. He opened his arms in a self encompassing gesture. His eyes narrowed at the mayor, a smirk dragging like an ugly scar across his face. “Perhaps that is what you meant, keeping your winters warm.” The Mayor’s eyes flared at this, hot and piercing, and the Mayor was suddenly gripping him close, their faces almost touching. Javert felt the heated breath of the Mayor flying at his face even as it cooled into a stream of frost.

Javert’s hands clenched about his nightstick as he shied away from the Mayor, but he was held firm. The Mayor was too strong, and Javert had not been prepared. The next sound that emerged from the Mayor was a guttural, urgent whisper.

“Javert, do not.”

“You are meant to uphold the law as I do,” said Javert, pushing the Mayor back.

“I will have no more of this talk of ‘law’—”

“Yet you persist in mocking it.”

“Your law,” growled the Mayor, dragging Javert by his collar towards him, “Would condemn a starving man to nineteen years jail, those under his care to _death_. As you intend with this woman.” The Mayor looked as if about to strike him, and in the lamp light his figure cut an imposing shadow.

It was the shadow of Jean Valjean.

At once the strange conversation nights prior swam to the surface of Javert’s mind, and he saw those inhuman eyes again, then scared in M. Madeleine’s bedroom, now alight with a dreadful, terrible anger. Javert twisted in M. Madeleine’s hands, dislodging his grip, and stumbled back two paces. He smelt the sweat and breath of a convict as he stood, half crouched, fingers clenching and unclenching. The Mayor’s last words clicked convulsively like broken clockwork. He felt bile rise in his throat, and tried to cough it away, but instead a small cry was wrenched out.

Javert shut his mouth, and straightened, and looked the Mayor coldly in the eye even as his temple steamed.

Then Javert spun on his heel and stormed towards his quarters, not hearing, and not caring if the Mayor called after him (the Mayor did not). However, when the station’s walls appeared, he turned an abrupt corner. He walked, and walked, and found himself etching a path along the town’s ramparts, far away from the commissariat and his rooms. He doubled his pace.

He carried no lantern with him, and the moon crept out only every few minutes, and with them the sight of M. Madeleine’s eyes would flood his view once more. Sad, angry, terrifying eyes, they hounded him with every step, and at times, when he rounded this corner, or stepped up to this step, he tracked those eyes in turn, feeling the wildness in him claw till he tore his gloves off, hands in half-curled fists. The eyes shifted, again and again, into those of Jean Valjean, with his yellow papers, with his parole route, walking off to an existence Javert had no desire to comprehend.

He walked till the eyes faded into a brightening mist, and stopped, suddenly.

He had walked twice about the town. It was morning. Javert found himself at the town’s south gates. A horse cart rode by. A cart—Javert sucked in a breath, letting the frost settle in his throat and lungs. He did not sense if he shivered. He made to move again, ignoring the stiffness in his legs, ignoring the sting about his fingers as he barrelled through the commissariat doors and headed to his desk. The fire had yet to be started, but it was no matter. He cast a look about the desk, fiddling for paper, for ink, for a pen. He thought again of the cart.

It would not do to be sloppy, even now, especially now. It would not do, either, to rely merely on his own memory. He fished in the cabinets for the report done up by the gendarme on duty that first day he had come to the town, his fingers sluggish and clumsy as he riffled through papers. Eventually, he found it. Yes, an accident in the street. The cart owner had provided some restitution to the victim. The officer had noted in remarks that such restitution might have amounted to more had the Mayor not appeared at that opportune moment, indeed, miraculously, for who could lift a cart?

This would do. He noted the date of the report, and the writer, and copied the necessary contents. Then he took fresh sheets of paper, and dipped his pen again.

It took a few drafts, for he would grip the pen either too tightly or too loose. He blew on his hand and rubbed fingers on his pant leg to recall their dexterity post-haste, but they did not listen through the hours that he remained crouched over his desk. Despite that, Javert persevered. At last, he was able to reach for the commissariat’s seal.

The papers had barely been folded under wax when Javert thrust them into the messenger’s pigeon hole. Then he quit the station for the day before indecision could make him take back the letter. There was none to take him to task for it.

He reached his rooms. He heated the water, poured it into the basin, took up a wash cloth. It was rough against his skin, and he rubbed, and rubbed, and rubbed at his face, ears, neck. Another cloth for his groin. He washed till the water turned cold and still he wiped the cloths over himself till he was uncomfortably pink. Then he donned his nightshirt and all but collapsed on the bed.

Javert thought to pray for peace, but peace eluded him like the feet of an escaped convict, and now the metal cross burdened his chest, this time burning, singeing, branding. But since Javert had no heart, he had no heart to remove the thing from where it hung.


	6. I am not naturally honest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A door is opened.

The snow turned to sleet the next day and remained so. The first snows had come too early. Nothing stuck except nightmares and sickness. The nights remained bitterly cold, more so because of the dampness, and Javert could not get his quarters to warm no matter how much he cajoled his stove. Instead, Javert spent many hours at the station, staying well past his required hours.

This in itself was not uncommon when applied to Javert, but the fever with which he locked himself at his desk cowed his officers. As they passed him, they seemed to slink by like greyhounds which had failed to catch the scent of their prey the hunt previous.

It was worse for the officers, because in truth they sought their rabbits and foxes as efficiently as before, but they neither knew that Javert sought a different beast, nor that the same beast hunted him in the dark corners of his mind. He dispatched reports to the Mayor by pen via the messengers, and moved singularly from street to station to quarters, alone. In the instances where there was the possibility of crossing the Mayor’s path, Javert would change course and head down a side street, greatcoat billowing about him like a flock of demented crows.

The Mayor did not send for him. For this, Javert entertained an emotion something like gladness.

The atmosphere at the station became unbearable. Officers preferred to mill outside during their breaks, despite the cold. It did not help that Javert had laid claim to all the coffee stores, till his teeth bore their permanent stain. At times, an officer would notice Javert pulling at his collar, fingers clutching convulsively around his neck as if something strangled him. Other times, it would be observed that Javert would touch his own lips absently, before catching himself and scowling at his nails, then gripping his pen and scratching deeper into the paper he was filling.

Of those who noticed these things, all had the sense not to mention or speak of it, even among themselves, for they knew that Javert was not a man who suffered fools, or talk. There remained no answer to Javert’s letter, though his patrol route brought him increasingly past the post office, and as he entered the commissariat, would drum his fingers at empty pigeon holes. 

This went on for two weeks.

On the Tuesday of the third week, the Mayor appeared at the station. This was highly irregular. The air in the station had turned jittery, an effect of an ill-tempered Javert, and with this new arrival, became more so. The Mayor stood at the entrance, patient and calm, seemingly unaffected, and kindly waved aside the junior officer who had hurried towards him in an attempt to receive his complaint.

The Mayor hummed lightly at the entrance and took his time in taking off his gloves and hat. When he looked up, the junior officer was still there. The Mayor nodded now, tucking his gloves into a pocket.

“I would speak with the Inspector, Javert,” he said, then made an abortive movement with his hands. It might have been called by some as uncertain, but the Mayor was not an uncertain man, so he drew himself together, and proceeded through the doorway into the inner office space. It did not take him long, for the place was small. At the end, was Javert. His officers crowded the front, at an opposite fire.

If Javert noticed, he did nothing more than bristle. The Mayor stood at arm’s length from Javert’s desk now. The Mayor spoke.

“Javert.”

The effect was immediate. Javert’s eyes raised themselves to the Mayor’s, pupils blackened and narrowed. His hand had stopped moving, and was now held an inch from the table, the pen in his hand threatening to drip ink. He replaced the pen in the ink pot.

“Monsieur le Maire,” he greeted, polite, and rose, both hands placed lightly on his desk. He bowed. His brows and mouth were flat. His hair, less so, and M. Madeleine’s wrist flexed by his side, but did not raise itself. This, Javert saw, as he kept his gaze downwards, and not at the Mayor’s face. 

“Again, you send reports by the hand of another,” said the Mayor. “I am displeased.” M. Madeleine’s last finger tapped lightly on the edge of Javert’s desk before it seemed to think better of it and withdrew. Javert watched it leave his line of sight as he spoke.

“Monsieur le Maire is displeased that I located the necessary articles to cite in the report to explain the curious incident of a dismissed, warranted arrest?” Javert’s words were quick and low, his eyes holding deference, but M. Madeleine perceived the beginnings of a sneer.

“I read that, Javert. It was satisfactory.”

“Then the law has been squashed adequately to fit.” The report sat in a drawer. He had written it the day after the letter to Paris. The full report was necessary, after all, since the matter had no longer become routine. There had been nothing incorrect about it, and yet, the matter had tasted bitter as Javert read through it on being done. But done it was, all actions justified. M. Chabouillet would not have disapproved.

The Mayor remained silent at his desk, though Javert thought he heard a concealed huff. His fingers twitched against the side of the table. “I do not understand Monsieur le Maire’s displeasure.”

“You could have briefed the report in person. It is a matter that concerned me, after all, and I would have to draft the final.”

“You gave your approval, monsieur.”

“I did,” replied M. Madeleine. A sigh followed.

Javert now observed that the Mayor had shifted his weight slightly. Distantly, he wondered if a limp would be noticeable when the Mayor walked off. He prevented his lips from curling. The letter had been sent, but nothing was assured. M. Madeleine was still the Mayor, though Javert did not wish to look up only to see sad eyes, only to see Valjean cloud the Mayor’s face.

“Forgive me monsieur. As you see, there is work to be done, and—” here he straightened, speaking to the front of the Mayor’s coat, “I am told you are busy yourself, at a hospital bedside.” His breath was soured both by stale sleep and his words. “Monsieur le Maire is kind.” He was careful to avoid inflection in his speech.

Javert saw the Mayor’s hands spasm strangely again. “I thirst,” M. Madeleine said, and indeed, he ground his words out as through sand. Javert thought to offer him vinegar.

“I did not think Monsieur le Maire would seek the station merely for water.” Javert blanched at his own words, even as his head craned itself in echo of the way they would to a criminal. The Mayor did not notice, instead moving to cross around the desk (too slowly to discern a limp, too quick for Javert to step away).

“Yet I move as through a dry land, where no water is,” said the Mayor, shifting close enough till Javert could feel the heat radiating off him. They stood there, silent, and so close, so very close. Javert did not turn his head, but could smell the Mayor’s clean scent, like fresh linen and newly baked bread. The scent warped, and Javert now felt the cloying in the atmosphere that had so repelled his officers. He swallowed against a retch.

He sensed, rather than heard, a click in the Mayor’s throat. The Mayor spoke softly. “I seek thee early. My soul thirsteth—my flesh longeth for thee.” The Mayor’s words breathed into Javert’s ear, the heat a brushing caress. Javert recoiled.

None of the men were near him, huddled as they were like tense cattle at the far end of the office. No hush had befallen the station, and a continued lowing hum came from the group. No doubt, the entire crew were studiously avoiding the Mayor and himself. Another noise bubbled within Javert’s head, as blood now raced through him, where before the sanctity of the station had been one of mechanical coolness.

A flush had reached the inside of his collar. The back of his knees bumped against the edge of his chair, and Javert found that he could move no further. When he looked up, it was to look at the gentle, pained smile of the Mayor, but Javert only saw Valjean.

“You forget my place, and yours, sir,” Javert managed, stumbling on the last syllable. His breath quickened as the Mayor considered him, eyes taking in his worried collar and the tuft of hair pushed up by the back of it. Javert imagined the eyes of Valjean doing the same, the day he had stopped him a last time, pressing in with the same closeness that the Mayor now stood with him, and shame tugged at his loins. The Mayor’s eyes, Valjean’s eyes, it did not matter, they concentrated so fully on him that Javert could imagine a hand slipping into his hair, down his throat—

His knee buckled, and Javert found that he could not straighten fully. Heat burned on his chest. His chin drew down to contain it, only succeeding in letting free another flame to pull between his legs.

Faintly, Javert realized that his breaths were coming shorter and faster, almost whistling through teeth which bit down on themselves. He did not speak, because he was not sure if it would emerge a sob or snarl. Or a moan. He tried to harden his mouth. His hands were clenched into painful fists, nails digging into his palms almost to break the skin.

He only realized his eyes had shut when he felt a hand resting about his wrist. It might as well have been about his throat. The Mayor barely gripped him, but Javert could not breathe. Salt sprung at his eyes, and he opened them to blink the sting away. He saw then that the Mayor’s movements were concealed to the rest of the room by the stack of papers on Javert’s desk, that none of his men so much as breathed in their direction, and that the Mayor was looking at him.

He then realized that the Mayor had been seeking something about his collar. It was too late to shy away completely, not without upsetting furniture. Instead, unwanted, his hardness made to drag his hips forward with his trousers, and Javert caved further in on himself in an attempt to still them. A flush crept to his jaw. Indeed, the Mayor appeared to be giving that particular line of skin, and the cloth just below it, undue attention. When Javert pulled his head backwards, he saw the Mayor’s eyebrows raise themselves high a moment before drawing together.

“You still wear it,” the Mayor said, rueful, and Javert hissed as if in pain, pulling his wrist back. The Mayor removed his hand, letting it fall to his side. Then the Mayor moved away, shoulders bowed. Again, like Valjean. Again.

Javert’s breath was a shudder that ran through him, horrified at what the Mayor’s proximity was doing to him, terrified that it was the projections of Jean Valjean which tugged at his prick’s length and sent coils of heat between his ribs though the cold afternoon sun beat down through the windows.

He had thought to bury that image away. He had succeeded through long toil in the night and the endless, bureaucratic language of reports, and statements, and records. Javert was a man of self-control. He had muttered this to himself every night the past weeks. Every night, as he washed about his neck and especially when the cloth caught on the rosary, the _thing_ he could not remove. It had succeeded.

It had failed.

The Mayor had stepped back, and looked at him now, hands in his pockets.

“You are a man under authority, having soldiers under you,” declared the Mayor softly. “You say to this man, go, and he goeth.” M. Madeleine’s eyes flicked down and then towards the group of officers near the entrance. The Mayor continued. “I am no Lord, but I would that thou shouldst come under my roof.”

Something twisted in Javert’s gut. He tried to wet his lips, but his tongue was like parchment. “Is this a calling to heel?” Javert whispered, and there was a lift to the question, though it barely broke past his mouth. It sounded in his ears, a high, needy keen. The Mayor sighed, shook his head once, tender and sad, pulling a sharp ache through Javert’s spine.

“This is no order. I would give you the choice. And—” the Mayor’s brows drew together once more as he considered Javert’s chest. “Still you carry my cross.” And still a spear pierced Javert’s side, because the voice was mingled with the want of Valjean: imagined, dreadful, unseemly. “Knock, Javert, and the door shall open.”

When the Mayor left, Javert fell almost painfully back into his chair, hands not daring to reach for the bulge which strained at his trousers.

None of his men made mention of the Mayor’s visit. By the end of the day, Javert’s shirt’s collar stuck out from the neck in rumpled points against his jaw, and his men made no comment on that either, though the youngest had quailed slightly when Javert all but shoved the reports in his hand to be dispatched. Then Javert quit the station, uncharacteristically on time. 

However, Javert did not choose to enter the Mayor’s house that night, or the next night, or the nights after for the next two and a half weeks. Instead, his eyes bore deep into the Mayor’s back when they crossed paths in the street, searching and brooding and shying away with suspicion and unheeded need. The Mayor took these looks with patience, like a saintly martyr buffeted by arrows from the devil, even as the thorn in Javert’s flesh dug, with the Mayor’s grace finding Javert ever more in torment. As the weeks passed, he saw the Mayor less and less on the street. He understood from the street that the Mayor had increased vigil at the hospital.

In all, Javert thought this arrangement preferable.

It was nearing solstice when the letter from the Prefecture at Paris arrived, and snow had begun to stick again. Javert had stepped out momentarily to view the horses and the men condemned to spend the night at the post, when the messenger approached. Missives were common, but not often were they from M. Chabouillet. On opening the seal, his eyes drank in the words, and if it were possible for eyes to do so, choked. For a moment, his veins ceased pumping, then redoubled their efforts in earnest. He inhaled sharply, ignoring the harshness of the air, seeing again the word ‘Valjean’ written in neat script.

His hand convulsed, crumpling the paper in his grip, and was frozen in place by the winter wind which seeped through his gloves.

He did not realize he was walking, without coat or hat, till the factory reared up in front of him. He did not realize that he still held the paper in his grip even as he pushed open a side door and proceeded to one of the halls, where he knew the Mayor would be at this hour marking his ledger, before the arrival of the workers.

For the first time in over a month, Javert stood in the factory, propelled by the blow the letter had dealt him. The Mayor’s mouth fell open slightly as he rose in surprise, consternation lining his forehead, unspeaking.

Javert slapped his feet to attention, soles echoing in the near empty factory hall. He did not dare look at the Mayor, the good Mayor, and focused his sight instead on a whorl in the bench before him.

“Monsieur le Maire, there is a crime I must declare, done to you.” Javert’s voice shook as he spoke. The Mayor’s frown deepened.

“It is I, monsieur, I who have disgraced this uniform and my office, I, who have done you wrong.” Let there be no forgiveness shown. The walk had caused the blood to pound painfully at his fingers, and the heat in his gloves was unbearable, but still Javert held them stiffly, sheathed rapier in one hand, clenched letter in the other. The paint seemed to curl at him in condemnation. Javert could only imagine the look on the Mayor’s face.

Indignity spurred him on. “I mistook you for a convict, sir. I reported to the Prefecture in Paris. Today, I learn they have caught the real man.” The Mayor remained silent. Javert swallowed and continued, directing his words to the panelling behind the Mayor. “He’s about to face the court.” Of course, the man had denied it, just as he had denied his crimes after 19 years in the Bagne. It was expected of a man who would not accept the laws of the land. But justice had her own claws, after all. “The law catches up with one and all, even this Jean Valjean.”

Yes. He allowed his mouth to twist upwards slightly at the thought of retribution on the man whose face had taunted him in the night shadows all these weeks and years, the thought of justice winning over the baseness of man, but then he remembered the reason for his presence in front of the Mayor, and his mouth drooped again. Javert’s crime was deep. So consumed was he in his wretchedness, that he did not see the Mayor start at the convict’s name.

The Mayor arose, and Javert’s eyes shifted to watch his coat hem move over the floor, closer, closer. 

“You say this man denies it all? You say he shows no sign of repentance, that he feigns comprehension?” the Mayor asked. “You say he will be returned to jail, to serve out this renewed sentence?” Closer.

Javert’s eyes shifted to the floor. Justice caught up with all. “Yes, sir, he will pay.” Javert was not exempt. “And so must I. Press charges against me, monsieur.” Already he was holding out his sword to be relieved, to be dismissed.

Surely the Mayor would dismiss him now, as was his right. Javert could see the Mayor’s shoes just in front of him, barely half a step away from his own boots.

Something in the Mayor’s demeanour twitched. “You have only done your duty,” the Mayor said, voice careful. The words came slowly to Javert’s mind. No. It was not a minor sin. It was grievous. It upset order. He had been rent by his own perversions, his own fancies, and now they threatened publicly the good name of a _good_ man. A man who had taken him in his arms and kissed his shoulder. A man who now pressed gently at his hand and sword such that they rested back against his hip. The warmth of that hand lingered through Javert’s glove, slid between his fingers, and Javert clamped down on his tongue, afraid of the noise which threatened to crawl out at the touch.

“I will not dismiss you,” said the Mayor, and Javert flinched at the cordiality in his tone. It would have been easier to suffer his anger.

“Return sir, to your post,” said the Mayor, eyes half-crinkled as if in reigned amusement at an over-eager child. It was no chastisement, and it too, was no request. It was a command, and Javert, being a man under orders and who gave orders, obeyed, even as the Mayor’s kindness pierced through him worse than any cruelty.

He left, attended to a few incidents that day, mind still whirling, then indicated his leave for the night and the morrow at the station. Relief and horror tussled within him. The Mayor was not Valjean. Valjean had been found. They said he was older, sillier, with none of the strength, that forbidden fruit, that Javert had once observed. It was well. Tomorrow, he would testify, and the matter of Valjean would be put to rest at last, and perhaps the Mayor would allow Javert to give him due recompense. Javert paced, unseeing, creating a shallow ditch in the snow with his tracks as he walked back and forth. The sky weighed heavy with clouds.

Only when a voice called did Javert stop. “Javert,” he heard, and looked up. Blinked. It appeared that the mairie’s gate had crept up on him. His fingers were truly chilled, now, and the crumpled missive was stuck in some pocket. He was not wearing his greatcoat, or his hat, and as if suddenly recognising this lack, his body gave in to a violent shudder.

The voice came again, to his left, and Javert turned to see the Mayor watching him, and nearing. The brim of his hat shadowed his face, but Javert saw the flickering reflections which belied the Mayor’s rapid blinking.

“M—Monsieur,” Javert managed, for his teeth had begun to chatter. “I—” he looked around him, unable to gain his bearings, wondering which street he had come up by, a misshapen smile twisting his mouth. “Javert comes to heel, monsieur,” he said, voice stricken.

“Javert, you shiver.” They had had this conversation before, thought Javert, even as he sagged against the wall. He passed the back of his hand over his face, the glove already mauled by frost, fingers clawed.

“I—I, you must punish me, Monsieur.” He bit out. “Some kind of, recompense. You must allow.” The Mayor had reached him. Javert felt a hand grasp his shoulder. He shook. “These would be the crumbs the dog would accept, though you break bread for the children.”

Something boiled in the Mayor’s posture at the words, but his eyes remained concerned. “You know not what you say, Javert.” The Mayor’s grip dug slightly into Javert’s shoulder, then loosened again. He heard a swallow. “You do not deserve to be turned out.”

“Dismiss me,” said Javert. The words were meant to hold finality, but they echoed a plea instead.

“It was misjudgement, nothing more,” the Mayor said, and his hands were at Javert’s elbow, his lower back, guiding him to the front door.

“It was slander,” Javert mumbled, and did not dare to lean into the Mayor’s touch, moving forward to avoid that possibility. They entered the study, the fire roaring. The Mayor made to speak twice, but stopped lest he interrupt Javert. Javert was babbling, and he knew it, but he could not dam the words that tumbled from him.

“You don’t understand, monsieur. That first day we met, when I compared you to a criminal, it was but comparison. And in my nights, it was but suspicion: angry, nagging suspicion. A man can have his suspicions, monsieur. But then it turns, like sin, monsieur, it grows from the inside first. It extends, it turns to action, and it is the action which I committed, Monsieur le Maire, in naming you Jean Valjean.” Then Javert leaned back into the chair he had been placed in. “I committed it to writing, Monsieur le maire. The record is there.” Javert fell silent. His boots and gloves had been removed, and the Mayor was rubbing his hands between his own. Large, rough hands moved methodically, till the temperature in Javert’s hands returned to normal. The Mayor did not speak, and he did not look at Javert. Likewise, Javert stared at the grate till he felt his pupils burn.

When Javert could finally look at the Mayor, the other man had moved back to sit in the opposing armchair, jaw clenching and unclenching, the lines on his face running taut. Javert, in his despair, uttered again, “Please monsieur, against you, you only, have I sinned. Yet you refuse to judge, sir, and it is your right. You give me no avenue of repentance.” His voice cracked in the last sentence, hoarsened by the weather and his own gulping breaths.

The Mayor hunched over as if receiving a blow at Javert’s words. Their knees almost touched. He reached over for the bread that had been laid prepared on the side-table, grasping a piece with slow deliberateness, and dipped it in the stew beside it, then he leaned towards Javert, and touched the piece to Javert’s chapped lips. “Eat,” said the Mayor, holding the bread as Javert allowed the savoury gravy to trickle into his mouth, closing his lips around a morsel and drawing it in slowly. The Mayor withdrew his hand, and Javert licked his lips, and again the bread came to his lips, and again he bit, and chewed, and swallowed. The Mayor’s throat bobbed with his.

Only when the whole piece was consumed did the Mayor finally lean back, now watching Javert silently. Javert sucked in his lips again, eyes taking time to focus on the Mayor’s face. When they did, he said, “Do not think, when I return from Arras tomorrow evening, that I will not persist in exacting my punishment.”

The Mayor’s fingers jumped slightly. “Arras?”

“The court for Valjean presides there tomorrow,” said Javert, voice strengthened by the food, “I am to ride tonight, to give my testimony in the morning, then I shall return. I have been summoned.”

“Ah.”

“Did I not tell Monsieur le Maire this?” Javert thought he had.

The Mayor waved the question away. Instead, “I see,” said the Mayor, and tilted his head sideways, as if avoiding a fly, fingers picking at the upholstery. He frowned at his fingers, jaws working, lips pursed as if he were chewing about words in his mouth. This continued for half a minute. Then the Mayor spoke.

“Jean Valjean,” the Mayor said. Unhappiness returned to score Javert’s face. The Mayor’s head remained in its tilt, but now he looked at Javert, eyes dark. The firelight did not seem to reach past his cheeks. Javert watched as the Mayor’s fingers reached up to tug at his cravat. “Jean Valjean,” repeated M. Madeleine, voice lowered, tasting as it were, the name.

“Monsieur, it was a crime.”

The Mayor shook his head, once, twice, something boiling in the shadows within his eyes. “This convict. This Jean Valjean,” he said. His words rolled off his lips like slow moving boulders. “He is that Jean you spoke off? From your youth. ”

Javert’s blush was instantaneous, though he sat very still now, eyes wide. The Mayor noticed, and shifted in his seat. The Mayor continued picking at his chair, fingertips punctuating his next words. “Javert,” he said, and Javert’s back moved to attention. “You wish punishment.” This required no response, but Javert gave a sharp, small nod, nonetheless. The cloth of the Mayor’s sleeve flexed.

“And do you wish punishment because you wronged me, or because you desired him?”

Javert’s face turned redder still. “I—I. Both,” he said helplessly, vision turning hazy as heat now pooled in his cheeks.

“But punishment would not dig out the root of your—” the Mayor’s lip curled as he spoke, fishing as it were for the next word. “—transgression.”

Javert could only nod, miserable and perplexed.

Decision clicked in the Mayor’s chin. “I have a better idea.”

“You wish to be purged with hyssop,” said the Mayor. “But it seems to me the crime,” and here the Mayor shrugged vaguely, one finger rising to smooth a brow, “The crime arose from your attempt to suppress his memory. And thus, you chain yourself to him.” Javert trembled at the dip his voice had taken.

“It seems to me,” the Mayor continued, “To purge yourself, you must willingly release him to the forefront of your mind.” The Mayor rose now.

Javert looked at him, unblinking, uncomprehending.

“I will aid you,” said the Mayor, standing to his full height. Melancholy mixed with simmering authority, he splayed a hand along Javert’s throat, heavy with intent. Javert felt his own pulse hammer against the Mayor’s fingers, even as the Mayor, voice rumbling through Javert’s neck, said again, “I will aid you.”

“I will be your Jean Valjean.”


	7. This is the chase

With those words, the Mayor drew Javert into a bruising, fumbling kiss, only relenting when both bodies began to claw for air. They broke as through an ice floe. The Mayor withdrew, panting, eyes lidded, forehead against Javert’s. His hand had reached round to cradle Javert’s neck, stroking behind his ear, and warmth passed from fingers and palms to the rapidly beating pulse embedded in Javert’s throat. Javert’s eyes were squeezed shut, his breath coming out in a low whine.

“What you propose. How is this punishment?” Javert panted.

“This is not punishment.”

Javert swallowed. “And so, my uniform troubles me.” He opened his eyes, remembering his own words. The law and its effects did not trouble honest men, but Javert, in turning spy on the Mayor himself, was far from an honest man. He felt his mouth twist in self-contempt. The Mayor tried to brush it away with his thumb. When that did not succeed, the Mayor spoke.

“You think yourself unworthy?” quizzed the Mayor.

“I know myself disgraced.” Javert avoided the Mayor’s gaze, but leaned into the touch of warm knuckles against his cheek. His breath hitched as he felt fingers unloose the fastening at his collar. “I know myself unworthy of these trappings.

“These trappings trap me.”

“No,” said the Mayor, “It is the shadow within, that Jean Valjean—” the Mayor half choked on the name as he broke speech to kiss Javert, releasing to say, “That Jean Valjean who entraps you.” M. Madeleine touched the sides of their noses together, breath mingling between mouths, and then, “Let us exorcize him together.”

“You would debase yourself—”

“I would raise you up, as on eagles’ wings.” The words were whispered low to his temple, and Javert’s brows drew, and Javert’s lips shook. “Wait for me in the bedroom,” said M. Madeleine, voice soft with unspoken promises that curled through Javert’s lungs, squeezing him. M. Madeleine was pointing at a door further down the hallway. The bedroom. Yes. Javert knew it. “Please.” The Mayor tapped the tip of Javert’s nose with a finger, kissed that drawn brow, then left the study.

Only when the door shut did Javert remember to breathe.

Javert stilled the roiling in his stomach, and got up. His legs worked like a new-born colt, and he gripped the backrest of his chair for support, unsteady a minute more, before he could finally edge outside the study and into the Mayor’s bedroom. He told himself this shivering was from standing in the cold, even as he pulled off his sodden boots and gloves and left them in the study. The walk to the bedroom seemed altogether too long.

Within the room, Javert fiddled at the buttons on his cuffs, choosing to stand near the fireplace. He quelled another shiver, despite the heat. The fire had been going in the bedroom for a while, and the room was suffused with warmth. The pleasantness was suffocating. Javert watched the flames, willing them to turn hellish. They did not.

Light footsteps approached from behind, and the door clicked shut. Still Javert did not turn around. He heard the clink of something (a saucer, perhaps) being placed on wood. Placed on the side table near the bed, judging from the direction of the sound. Javert bit the inside of his lower lip as he heard a rustling close to his elbow, and knew that the Mayor stood just behind him.

“You arrest me,” whispered the Mayor, the words crunching like gravel. Javert clenched his hands which threatened to shake, and turned around. The Mayor’s arms drooped, his shoulders bowed, and he hunched in such a way that their eyes were almost level. He stood dressed in shirtsleeves and trousers, top buttons undone, suspenders draping over his broad chest. Something wild leapt deep in those eyes, but the image was not exact. The words were mere conceit. He was still the Mayor. Javert stepped further into the room, watching as the Mayor turned with him, till M. Madeleine stood before him now in shadow. Javert narrowed his eyes at the bulk before him. He could almost see the hacked hair, watch the light outline a skull which cringed and stewed in defiance.

Almost.

Javert lifted the back of his hand to touch his knuckles against the Mayor’s cheekbone. First one side, then the other. The Mayor stood still, skin taut: suspended, Javert imagined, between a decision to flinch, or duck, or push forward. Javert did not look at his eyes. Not yet.

“Two,” said Javert, experimentally dragging the knuckles around the jawline which had now clenched. “Four,” said Javert, circling where cheek met chin. “Six.” The Mayor’s brows drew into a deep scowl at the numbers, and he lifted his chin away from Javert’s hand before Javert could complete the sequence.

“I have a name,” he said, voice hollowed, angry. Heat unfurled within Javert at the tone, spreading from his belly to loins and washing back up in waves. His eyes shot to the Mayor’s. The Mayor’s eyes turned away. That would not do. Javert opened his hand now, grabbing underneath the Mayor’s jaw, and levered thumb and forefinger till the chin turned reluctantly to him again. The Mayor’s chin was shaven, the hair by his ears neat, the opposite of the gaunt, rudely shaved head and unruly beard of a certain convict. But his eyes, sullen and bared, were Valjean’s.

“Yes,” hummed Javert, “246O1,” and felt a cold smile rise in his face at the Mayor’s agitation. It was Valjean who snarled now, but Javert pressed his advantage, licking his lips, staring into feral eyes, slowly sinking into that crescent fanged world. His eyes became lidded as the faces of mayor and prisoner swam into one.

“My convict,” he said, pressing a light kiss to the space beside his thumb. He could feel the other man’s pulse, pushing in futile effort at his fingers. Javert kissed the vein there, fascinated with how the Adam’s apple in front of him moved with the Mayor’s gulp. Then he stroked that too, slowly, observing the flush which followed in his hand’s wake.

It was Valjean, now, who seemed to shrink away from his touch, eyes shut and a sheen of sweat coating his face. The man’s mouth was compressed into a thin, cragged line. Javert rubbed his thumb over it harshly, drawing out a ragged breath from the captive. Then he pushed his thumb into the gap Valjean had left open, tongue following to sup at teeth and gum. He drew back, and rubbed the convict’s lips again.

“Your strength, I watched it, at Toulon.” Javert spoke as if in trance, but it seemed it was Valjean who remained hypnotized by his touch, unmoving as he was.

“I knew you for a beast, but still I watched you.” He realized as he said this that he had been kneading at the skin of Valjean’s neck, pinching lightly, then harder to pull a hiss, rolling the fold of skin between forefinger and thumb. Releasing, pinching, releasing again watching as pink began to rise at the worried spot. Here the skin was rougher. It could be the chafe of heavy irons, thought Javert as he rubbed at it, hearing the soft puffs that coincided with the working of the throat in his hand.

“I watched you. I watched you. Did it burn?”

“Yes.” The word came shackled.

He reached back to wrap his hand in the hair at the base of Valjean’s head, and pulled down slowly, baring Valjean’s throat. His other hand had begun traversing the rest of the Mayor’s still clothed body, running a path from shoulder past clavicle, across chest, then dipping behind ribs to the small of his back. Javert heard an intake of breath as his hand rested near the join between buttock and thigh. Then Javert squeezed.

Defiant eyes snapped to his, even as a peculiar, foreign noise bubbled from Valjean. Javert’s uniform had begun troubling him in entirely different ways, but he ignored the tenting of his trousers to linger at the bulge forming in front of the Mayor’s own. He bent his head to the other man’s neck. In the Mayor’s sweat which Javert licked away at his collar bone, Javert imagined he tasted the salt traces of Toulon, imagined he smelt the toil of the shipyard, but not as had so often been, unwelcome. So drugged by the newness of this thought, Javert moved his hand again to Valjean’s, yes, Valjean’s front, brushing at the inner thigh. Valjean’s hips jerked away, but not enough to escape Javert’s fingers.

“You would see this beast tamed? Broken?” issued Valjean, eyes burning, shoulders shaking. Javert thought he saw tears spring in the man’s eyes. Yes. Humanity. Javert’s smile was almost contemplative as he trailed a solitary finger along the seam at the crotch of the other man’s trousers, from the bottom of the bulge to the top. Valjean arched as if struck, gasping out, “Were whips and chains not enough?”

“No,” said Javert. “For they would render you beast, still.”

Valjean’s breathing turned harsh and his chest rose and fell like bellows at a furnace. Again, a choked sound escaped him, for Javert had found the trouser fastenings, and was slowly loosening the clasps there. Valjean had weakly (such a strange thing) begun leaning into Javert’s touch, making shameful, needy sounds, hands fisted at his sides. Still, it was not enough. There was something lacking, thought Javert absently, though his own arousal knotted about him.

Javert remembered a man who cried his first night at Toulon, garbling half formed names over, and over, and over again as he clutched at his wrists. He remembered also, that after that first week, that man was no more. Such was the information. Something in him had mourned the loss, had hoped in the years after to provoke a response other than empty, dazed hatred. Anything. Sorrow, blinding rage, longing.

He had not then, even in his waking moments, entirely discounted lust. Such thoughts were fleeting then. But now, the man before him like this, they drove themselves forward and with them, peculiar words from Javert.

“I would see the beast turned man again,” said Javert, “Not from a belle’s tears, but your own.” At this, something broke in Valjean’s face. A low moan wrenched free from his lips even as his arms, those fearsome arms, wrapped about Javert’s middle and tackled him to the floor. Javert’s back struck wood, wind knocked out of him with a terrible blow. When he had regained breath, Valjean lay spread on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the ground, gasping wild, primal thirst. As his eyes caught Valjean’s, the convict ground their hips together.

Valjean’s voice was vicious purr as he pressed his lips to the shell of Javert’s ear. “Monsieur,” he said, and it was Javert’s turn to moan.

“Would you teach me the Lord’s prayer as you touched me?” asked Valjean, biting out the words. “Would you teach me to ask for forgiveness for my—” his hips moved against Javert, “—trespasses?”

“Would you have me recite the Psalms, to bring my soul out of prison?” A laugh ugly and dark sounded above Javert. Quick fingers mercilessly attacked the buttons of his jacket. The voice continued. “That I might praise thy name?” Javert’s shirt was soon undone too, and a large fevered hand pressed into Javert’s chest, curling in the dusting of hairs there.

“Or would you remember my name, and let me, unlike that first Jean, baptise you with this unholy water.” Javert felt the press of the other man’s prick through the layers of cloth, hot and heavy, and blood rushed to his own in answer. Knowing that his under-trousers were already bearing the stain of his arousal, Javert bit his lip as another flush overtook him.

“Or perhaps I would, like the disciple Christ loved, offer in final supplication,” murmured Valjean, leaning fully on Javert, heaving yet another vulgar thrust, “‘Even so, come.’” Valjean bit into Javert’s now exposed shoulder, and Javert let out a singular, winded laugh, blood singing, because here it was, what had been lacking. Here was the chase, so long gone, at last.

“Such would be true revelation,” Javert managed to say between breaths, teeth bared in victory, though he was held fast under Valjean.

The rosary hung shining on Javert’s quivering skin, and Valjean picked at it with heavy fingers and heavier eyes.

“You _want_ this yoke, Javert,” he said lowly, and chuckled when Javert bucked up into him sharply. Valjean kissed Javert, mouth coarse, pulling them both up to stand. He half carried, half dragged Javert towards the bed, pushing the last of jacket and shirt off him. Javert tore at the buttons of the Mayor’s shirt. The suspenders were pushed past the Mayor’s shoulders in lewd snaps.

As the back of Javert’s knees hit the edge of the bed, they parted. He saw then what the Mayor had placed at the table. The scent of olives floated to his nostrils, and Javert noticed golden green translucence sitting innocently in a saucer. Blood rushed past his temples. He grabbed at shirt folds and dragged Valjean down with him to the mattress, legs still over the edge. His erection throbbed against constricting cloth, Valjean’s thigh pressing against it.

Javert saw Valjean’s eyes heat, felt a hand reach between them to palm him roughly. He did not look away. Valjean turned his hand, unfastened Javert’s trousers, then slipped further underneath to fondle him rougher still. “You’ve hungered for this,” said Valjean, voice that of a starved man, wrist moving mercilessly as he gripped Javert’s prick.

“See how you moan, see how you press into me—” here, Valjean’s throat made a clicking noise, eyes clouding, his mouth left open a moment before he swallowed, a half-smirk maddening his face. Mouth still so shaped, he leaned forwards and with a voice lower than ever, said, “Like a _bitch_ in heat.”

Javert only pressed and groaned the more. Something dark licked at his mind, and he looked up at the face above him, his lips an echo of the other man’s.

Because it was Valjean who looked back with the softness of the Mayor, because it was M. Madeleine whose eyes scorched with the lust of the convict, Javert dared to wet his lips and say, “Taste.” He laid hands on the Mayor’s hips like a cat pawing at prey, and pushed down even as he sat up. Valjean shook as he knelt, face level with Javert’s waist.

“Eat.” Javert proffered the head of his prick to the Mayor’s mouth, as but half an hour ago the Mayor had held a morsel of bread to his. “This is my body.” The words seemed even more obscene, with the Mayor before him like a penitent. The Mayor—Valjean, stared frozen at the leaking head for a while, his lips parted and kissed dark, his hair dishevelled, his eyes wide and uncertain. _He has not done this before_ , Javert realized. The thought only caused his cock to twitch in his hand.

Then, “In remembrance of thee,” said M. Madeleine. He nodded, closed his eyes, and Valjean’s lips closed about the tip of Javert’s shaft, drew him in midway, and sucked. Javert gripped the Mayor’s hair for fear that his hips would drive forwards and choke the man. A muffled groan rose from Valjean, and Javert echoed it and doubled over, his hips rocking back and forth in agonised inches.

“ _Putain_.” Javert grunted the word, and could not decide if it was merely a cry, or if he meant Valjean, or himself. He looked down, and saw red lips stretched over his cock, saw the shadow Valjean’s own erection through his underclothes as it jutted proudly over the top of his unfastened trousers. He swore again, and pulled himself from Valjean’s lips with a soft pop. It echoed lewdly in invitation, and Javert saw Valjean’s pelvis dip sharply inward at the noise. The other man’s lashes fell to his cheeks, damp with sweat and desperation, mouth hung in half an O.

He gripped Valjean’s arm, and the man stood as if commanded, though Javert had not spoken. Javert squinted up at Valjean, now towering over him, taking in the sight of his broad chest which lay exposed. His unbuttoned shirt stuck to his skin, and trailed over his trousers, which now became Javert’s focus. They were already undone. A tug, and they pooled about the man’s ankles. Another tug, and his underclothes followed.

From the dark thatch of hair covering Valjean’s groin, his erection stood, an unbroken mast.

“246O1,” he said, and clasped Valjean’s wrist, but the numbers spoken out loud caused anger to uncoil in Valjean, and he batted away Javert’s hands with thunder in his brow, then shoved the other man, sending Javert sprawling into the sheets. Javert almost smirked, even as his breath was knocked out of him once more. It was so predictable, so easy to provoke his hand now, and at the casual show of Valjean’s strength, his own cock strained to be touched. Now Valjean stretched above Javert on the bed, his shirt hanging loose like a tent over them both.

“Do you think a convict would let you claim his wrists again?” whispered Valjean. “Do you think he would let you remove his shirt to see the brand across his shoulder?” He pressed down on Javert, and Javert shook his head in wordless ‘no’, suddenly not wanting the Mayor to remove his shirt, afraid that if he saw an unspotted back, Valjean would retreat forever to skulk at the back of his mind. He let his hands fall to the sheets.

Valjean was speaking.

“I would you know who I am,” said Valjean, divesting Javert of his remaining clothes with one hand, the other searching to tease at a nipple. Javert arched into the touch, a whimper escaping him. “You shall _know_ me,” said Valjean, and rutted against Javert’s thigh, eliciting another, longer whimper. Ignoring Javert’s attempts to gain leverage and friction against his own legs, poised just out of reach, Valjean reached into the saucer of oil, coating his fingers almost too thoroughly.

Javert’s thighs trembled as he watched the Mayor move his hand between Javert’s legs, and run a slick finger down the thudding vein along his prick’s underside, behind his balls, further back between his cleft, until it found a ring of muscle. Hesitance flit across Valjean’s face, and again Javert felt a roiling heat spool and wind in his groin at the thought that the Mayor—no—Valjean, no, perhaps both, had not touched another man so. Then the finger breached him, and Javert threw his head back against the pillow, and could not look at the man.

“You open so willingly,” marvelled Valjean, moving the finger carefully, too carefully inside. “I had heard of—” Valjean mused, then Javert felt a crooked finger moving upwards, seeking. The finger pressed, and Javert could feel the veins within him throb against it. He gasped and turned his face into his shoulder. The finger pressed further, towards a spot of flesh, and the veins pulsed ever quicker as the finger found its mark.

“ _Putain_. Mercy,” Javert groaned, even as his hips levered upwards and down again on the finger.

“You should see your face,” growled Valjean against Javert’s belly, moist with sweat. “So debauched.” And Javert shivered, and reached down, and pulled Valjean’s head up.

“Then show me,” said Javert, daring, even as he gasped and twisted under the Mayor’s ministrations. Something—want—crossed over Madeleine’s face before it turned again into Valjean, hungry and urgent. The finger left Javert, then Valjean was rising up slightly on his legs, thighs straining, hand readied underneath. The hips shot down as Valjean impaled himself on his own finger, and his face contorted in silent, sweet agony. Javert thought he might come at the sight.

The Mayor moved his finger in and out, then added another, slowly thrusting inside himself, face raised and eyes closed. Javert wondered if he had done that before, in this bed. As he clutched at his own need, Javert wondered who might have filled the Mayor’s—M. Madeleine’s fantasies, and groaned as he was bold enough to imagine _that it might have been him_. “I would know you,” he said, voice hoarse. He repeated it twice more, and on the third time he reached to still the other man’s thighs. Valjean looked at him, and both men shuddered. Javert reached for the saucer, and held it out to Valjean.

Oil dripped between them as Valjean, with the Mayor’s fingers, coated Javert’s now red, fully erect prick. Then he settled over Javert, and pushed downwards, slowly, surely. Valjean breathed in, exhaled, and pushed _out_ , then Javert’s prick was enveloped in tight, thrumming heat. His stomach tensed, hips angling upwards, breath battling with the groans which spasmed through him. Valjean gave a soft, keening sigh, that was so _unlike_ Valjean, so unlike the Mayor. Then his eyes hardened, and he ground against Javert, hands gripping the folds at Javert sides.

“Who am I?” the Mayor grunted, punctuating the question with a thrust of his hips. Javert cried out. The Mayor leaned over him now, calves gripping Javert’s waist and hip on either side. Javert imagined the view from above, and as the Mayor pressed down to Javert, his own erection between their bodies, Javert thought that the Mayor; that Valjean, looked not unlike a man prostrate in prayer.

The image jerked his hips upwards, further into the tight heat of the Mayor, of Valjean, dislodging the crucifix from the hollow of his throat. He bucked again, hands clinging to a shirted back, imagining that through the cloth he could trace the letters _T.F_.

“Who am I?” the phrase was muttered over and over in Javert’s ear, a never ceasing cascade which watered the ground in the cavity beneath his breastbone. The Mayor thrust again. Valjean thrust again. White and black warred, and mixed, and gave to red. “Who am I?” But Javert could not say a name.

“Thou,” replied Javert instead, almost a wail. He heard the Mayor groan above him, a sorrowful, yearning sound, deepening a final thrust, and sticky warmth spread between their bodies.

The watered ground bore fruit. Javert felt a pounding in his chest, and knew he had a heart, that the heart was a tree; was wood that he would let the man above him hew in two. Then all words were cut off as he spent himself, whole body wracked with quivers and choked ecstasy. Javert collapsed back on the bed, feeling lips pressing under his chin, into his shoulders, as a voice whispered into his hair: 

“I am thy prisoner of hope.”

—

The Mayor helped him dress. Again, as if Javert was a child. The Mayor placed boots on his feet, and kissed his knee. The Mayor saw him to the door, draping a spare coat about him, which Javert had not the strength to reject, and touched his face in farewell.

Javert had already stepped through the threshold when he felt his hand clasped in that of another, and as he turned, the Mayor raised it to his lips to leave the faintest brush.

“Farewell, Javert,” said M. Madeleine. The salutation seemed to slur clumsily, but M. Madeleine’s face was hidden in the darkness of the doorway, and Javert could not place his tone. Javert nodded, and left for his quarters. Arras called. He was already late, and would have to change horses along the way.

His glove clung to the touch of M. Madeleine’s lips throughout the journey.

—

It was the last Javert saw of M. Madeleine.

No, this was not strictly true. For, when Javert clapped eyes on Valjean in the hospital, who reared real and full in front of him, it was M. Madeleine who haunted his features, lingering in the shades of his face. The wheel had turned around. Valjean was nothing, nay, Valjean was everything, and the good Mayor a spectre.

Javert was a simple man. He had understood, when he received the message from his officer, in two words, that the Mayor was no more. He understood: the Mayor had been a lie, a lie constructed by Jean Valjean, a notorious ex-convict. He _understood_ : their nights had been but bribes which spoke of his own foolishness, but Javert expected no less from a con. He understood that Jean Valjean was wholly deceit, and so pursued the convict with single-mindedness.

But still M. Madeleine’s eyes pleaded within Valjean’s face, still M. Madeleine’s brows softened as Valjean the convict glanced pity at the dead woman in a cold bed, and Javert, like a wounded beast, roared at the scum that bore the Mayor’s face.

And still, even when his rapier tipped against Valjean’s ignominious chest, the pain in Valjean’s eyes was M. Madeleine’s. Then Valjean hurtled himself through the back door and into the sea, taking M. Madeleine with him in a splash that sounded like death.

And Javert felt his wooden heart turn to stone.

Javert was a simple man, and did not mourn a lie, and was not surprised when he lost Valjean to the shadows. For this was the judgement, that men preferred darkness to the light.

Javert resolved not to be man.

All the same, a crucifix smote his breast, and a rosary twisted about his neck, leaving him no room for air.


End file.
